Exploring Automated Distractor Generation for Math Multiple-choice Questions via Large Language Models

Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) are ubiquitous in almost all levels of education since they are easy to administer, grade, and are a reliable format in assessments and practices. One of the most important aspects of MCQs is the distractors, i.e., incorrect options that are designed to target common errors or misconceptions among real students. To date, the task of crafting high-quality distractors largely remains a labor and time-intensive process for teachers and learning content designers, which has limited scalability. In this work, we study the task of automated distractor generation in the domain of math MCQs and explore a wide variety of large language model (LLM)-based approaches, from in-context learning to fine-tuning. We conduct extensive experiments using a real-world math MCQ dataset and find that although LLMs can generate some mathematically valid distractors, they are less adept at anticipating common errors or misconceptions among real students.

Exploring Automated Distractor and Feedback Generation for Math Multiple-choice Questions via In-context Learning

Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) are ubiquitous in almost all levels of education since they are easy to administer, grade, and are a reliable format in both assessments and practices. An important aspect of MCQs is the distractors, i.e., incorrect options that are designed to target specific misconceptions or insufficient knowledge among students. To date, the task of crafting high-quality distractors has largely remained a labor-intensive process for teachers and learning content designers, which has limited scalability. In this work, we explore the task of automated distractor and corresponding feedback message generation in math MCQs using large language models. We establish a formulation of these two tasks and propose a simple, in-context learning-based solution. Moreover, we explore using two non-standard metrics to evaluate the quality of the generated distractors and feedback messages. We conduct extensive experiments on these tasks using a real-world MCQ dataset that contains student response information. Our findings suggest that there is a lot of room for improvement in automated distractor and feedback generation. We also outline several directions for future work

A Conceptual Model for End-to-End Causal Discovery in Knowledge Tracing

In this paper, we take a preliminary step towards solving the problem of causal discovery in knowledge tracing, i.e., finding the underlying causal relationship among different skills from real-world student response data. This problem is important since it can potentially help us understand the causal relationship between different skills without extensive A/B testing, which can potentially help educators to design better curricula according to skill prerequisite information. Specifically, we propose a conceptual solution, a novel causal gated recurrent unit (GRU) module in a modified deep knowledge tracing model, which uses i) a learnable permutation matrix for causal ordering among skills and ii) an optionally learnable lower-triangular matrix for causal structure among skills. We also detail how to learn the model parameters in an end-to-end, differentiable way. Our solution placed among the top entries in Task 3 of the NeurIPS 2022 Challenge on Causal Insights for Learning Paths in Education. We detail preliminary experiments as evaluated on the challenge's public leaderboard since the ground truth causal structure has not been publicly released, making detailed local evaluation impossible.