A Unified Response Framework for Questions and Tutoring Dialogues

Zhangqi Duan, Simon Woodhead, Maya Miller-Vedam, Andrew Lan

Existing student models in educational applications largely focus on student responses to questions. However, as tutoring becomes more accessible at large scale, it is important to analyze dialogues between tutors and students, which may reveal fine-grained evidence on student knowledge. In this work, we propose a unified framework that models both student responses to questions and tutor-posed subtasks during dialogues on a shared item response theory (IRT) scale. We first identify mathematical subtasks in tutoring dialogues, rewrite them into self-contained questions, and identify the correctness of student responses to these subtasks. We then develop an IRT framework that estimates question/subtask difficulty from text, tracks students' evolving abilities across question-answering and dialogue interactions, and a novel method to leverages tutor moves between consecutive subtasks to regularize their difficulty values. We evaluate our framework on two real-world math education datasets containing both human- and AI-tutored dialogues. Results show that our framework outperforms strong baselines on both question difficulty prediction and response correctness prediction.