DrawSim-PD: Simulating Student Science Drawings to Support NGSS-Aligned Teacher Diagnostic Reasoning
This addresses the challenge of data scarcity in visual assessment research for K-12 science teacher training, though it is incremental as it builds on existing generative methods for educational simulations.
The paper tackles the problem of limited access to authentic student work for teacher professional development by introducing DrawSim-PD, a generative framework that simulates NGSS-aligned student science drawings with controllable imperfections, resulting in a corpus of 10,000 artifacts verified by educators with over 84% positive alignment to NGSS expectations.
Developing expertise in diagnostic reasoning requires practice with diverse student artifacts, yet privacy regulations prohibit sharing authentic student work for teacher professional development (PD) at scale. We present DrawSim-PD, the first generative framework that simulates NGSS-aligned, student-like science drawings exhibiting controllable pedagogical imperfections to support teacher training. Central to our approach are apability profiles--structured cognitive states encoding what students at each performance level can and cannot yet demonstrate. These profiles ensure cross-modal coherence across generated outputs: (i) a student-like drawing, (ii) a first-person reasoning narrative, and (iii) a teacher-facing diagnostic concept map. Using 100 curated NGSS topics spanning K-12, we construct a corpus of 10,000 systematically structured artifacts. Through an expert-based feasibility evaluation, K--12 science educators verified the artifacts' alignment with NGSS expectations (>84% positive on core items) and utility for interpreting student thinking, while identifying refinement opportunities for grade-band extremes. We release this open infrastructure to overcome data scarcity barriers in visual assessment research.