ISD-Agent-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating LLM-based Instructional Design Agents

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have shown promising potential in automating Instructional Systems Design (ISD), a systematic approach to developing educational programs. However, evaluating these agents remains challenging due to the lack of standardized benchmarks and the risk of LLM-as-judge bias. We present ISD-Agent-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark comprising 25,795 scenarios generated via a Context Matrix framework that combines 51 contextual variables across 5 categories with 33 ISD sub-steps derived from the ADDIE model. To ensure evaluation reliability, we employ a multi-judge protocol using diverse LLMs from different providers, achieving high inter-judge reliability. We compare existing ISD agents with novel agents grounded in classical ISD theories such as ADDIE, Dick \& Carey, and Rapid Prototyping ISD. Experiments on 1,017 test scenarios demonstrate that integrating classical ISD frameworks with modern ReAct-style reasoning achieves the highest performance, outperforming both pure theory-based agents and technique-only approaches. Further analysis reveals that theoretical quality strongly correlates with benchmark performance, with theory-based agents showing significant advantages in problem-centered design and objective-assessment alignment. Our work provides a foundation for systematic LLM-based ISD research.

HAE-RAE Bench: Evaluation of Korean Knowledge in Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) pretrained on massive corpora exhibit remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks, however, the attention given to non-English languages has been limited in this field of research. To address this gap and assess the proficiency of language models in the Korean language and culture, we present HAE-RAE Bench, covering 6 tasks including vocabulary, history, and general knowledge. Our evaluation of language models on this benchmark highlights the potential advantages of employing Large Language-Specific Models(LLSMs) over a comprehensive, universal model like GPT-3.5. Remarkably, our study reveals that models approximately 13 times smaller than GPT-3.5 can exhibit similar performance levels in terms of language-specific knowledge retrieval. This observation underscores the importance of homogeneous corpora for training professional-level language-specific models. On the contrary, we also observe a perplexing performance dip in these smaller LMs when they are tasked to generate structured answers.