Guidelines for Designing AI Technologies to Support Adult Learning

AI-powered educational technologies have demonstrated measurable benefits for learners, but their design and evaluation have largely centered on K-12 contexts. As a result, many AI-supported learning systems remain poorly aligned with the needs, constraints, and goals of adult learners. To better understand how AI systems function in adult education, this paper examines the deployment of several AI learning technologies developed within a multidisciplinary, national research institute in the United States focused on adult learning and online education. Drawing on longitudinal deployment data, we conducted a reflexive thematic analysis to identify recurring challenges and design considerations across systems. These insights were synthesized into a set of 19 design guidelines intended to inform future AI-supported adult learning technologies. We demonstrate the utility of these guidelines through a heuristic evaluation of the deployed systems. Lastly, we present a guideline exploration tool that aids in the ideation of technologies by connecting the guidelines to stakeholder statements surfaced in the analysis process.

LLM Prompt Evaluation for Educational Applications

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly common in educational applications, there is a growing need for evidence-based methods to design and evaluate LLM prompts that produce personalized and pedagogically aligned out-puts. This study presents a generalizable, systematic approach for evaluating prompts, demonstrated through an analysis of LLM-generated follow-up questions in a structured dialogue activity. Six prompt templates were designed and tested. The templates incorporated established prompt engineering patterns, with each prompt emphasizing distinct pedagogical strategies. The prompt templates were compared through a tournament-style evaluation framework that can be adapted for other educational applications. The tournament employed the Glicko2 rating system with eight judges evaluating question pairs across three dimensions: format, dialogue support, and appropriateness for learners. Data was sourced from 120 authentic user interactions across three distinct educational deployments. Results showed that a single prompt related to strategic reading out-performed other templates with win probabilities ranging from 81% to 100% in pairwise comparisons. This prompt combined persona and context manager pat-terns and was designed to support metacognitive learning strategies such as self-directed learning. The methodology showcases how educational technology re- searchers can systematically evaluate and improve prompt designs, moving beyond ad-hoc prompt engineering toward evidence-based prompt development for educational applications.

iScore: Visual Analytics for Interpreting How Language Models Automatically Score Summaries

The recent explosion in popularity of large language models (LLMs) has inspired learning engineers to incorporate them into adaptive educational tools that automatically score summary writing. Understanding and evaluating LLMs is vital before deploying them in critical learning environments, yet their unprecedented size and expanding number of parameters inhibits transparency and impedes trust when they underperform. Through a collaborative user-centered design process with several learning engineers building and deploying summary scoring LLMs, we characterized fundamental design challenges and goals around interpreting their models, including aggregating large text inputs, tracking score provenance, and scaling LLM interpretability methods. To address their concerns, we developed iScore, an interactive visual analytics tool for learning engineers to upload, score, and compare multiple summaries simultaneously. Tightly integrated views allow users to iteratively revise the language in summaries, track changes in the resulting LLM scores, and visualize model weights at multiple levels of abstraction. To validate our approach, we deployed iScore with three learning engineers over the course of a month. We present a case study where interacting with iScore led a learning engineer to improve their LLM's score accuracy by three percentage points. Finally, we conducted qualitative interviews with the learning engineers that revealed how iScore enabled them to understand, evaluate, and build trust in their LLMs during deployment.