Rewarding How Models Think Pedagogically: Integrating Pedagogical Reasoning and Thinking Rewards for LLMs in Education

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as intelligent tutoring systems, yet research on optimizing LLMs specifically for educational contexts remains limited. Recent works have proposed reinforcement learning approaches for training LLM tutors, but these methods focus solely on optimizing visible responses while neglecting the model's internal thinking process. We introduce PedagogicalRL-Thinking, a framework that extends pedagogical alignment to reasoning LLMs in education through two novel approaches: (1) Pedagogical Reasoning Prompting, which guides internal reasoning using domain-specific educational theory rather than generic instructions; and (2) Thinking Reward, which explicitly evaluates and reinforces the pedagogical quality of the model's reasoning traces. Our experiments reveal that domain-specific, theory-grounded prompting outperforms generic prompting, and that Thinking Reward is most effective when combined with pedagogical prompting. Furthermore, models trained only on mathematics tutoring dialogues show improved performance on educational benchmarks not seen during training, while preserving the base model's factual knowledge. Our quantitative and qualitative analyses reveal that pedagogical thinking reward produces systematic reasoning trace changes, with increased pedagogical reasoning and more structured instructional decision-making in the tutor's thinking process.

OpenLearnLM Benchmark: A Unified Framework for Evaluating Knowledge, Skill, and Attitude in Educational Large Language Models

Large Language Models are increasingly deployed as educational tools, yet existing benchmarks focus on narrow skills and lack grounding in learning sciences. We introduce OpenLearnLM Benchmark, a theory-grounded framework evaluating LLMs across three dimensions derived from educational assessment theory: Knowledge (curriculum-aligned content and pedagogical understanding), Skills (scenario-based competencies organized through a four-level center-role-scenario-subscenario hierarchy), and Attitude (alignment consistency and deception resistance). Our benchmark comprises 124K+ items spanning multiple subjects, educational roles, and difficulty levels based on Bloom's taxonomy. The Knowledge domain prioritizes authentic assessment items from established benchmarks, while the Attitude domain adapts Anthropic's Alignment Faking methodology to detect behavioral inconsistency under varying monitoring conditions. Evaluation of seven frontier models reveals distinct capability profiles: Claude-Opus-4.5 excels in practical skills despite lower content knowledge, while Grok-4.1-fast leads in knowledge but shows alignment concerns. Notably, no single model dominates all dimensions, validating the necessity of multi-axis evaluation. OpenLearnLM provides an open, comprehensive framework for advancing LLM readiness in authentic educational contexts.

Pedagogy-R1: Pedagogically-Aligned Reasoning Model with Balanced Educational Benchmark

Recent advances in large reasoning models (LRMs) show strong performance in structured domains such as mathematics and programming; however, they often lack pedagogical coherence and realistic teaching behaviors. To bridge this gap, we introduce Pedagogy-R1, a framework that adapts LRMs for classroom use through three innovations: (1) a distillation-based pipeline that filters and refines model outputs for instruction-tuning, (2) the Well-balanced Educational Benchmark (WBEB), which evaluates performance across subject knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, tracing, essay scoring, and teacher decision-making, and (3) a Chain-of-Pedagogy (CoP) prompting strategy for generating and eliciting teacher-style reasoning. Our mixed-method evaluation combines quantitative metrics with qualitative analysis, providing the first systematic assessment of LRMs' pedagogical strengths and limitations.