Hey Chat, Can You Teach Me? Structuring Socratic Dialogue for Human Learning in the Wild
Large language models are now widely used for everyday learning, but the underlying interactions are typically unstructured chats rather than following a curriculum. Unlike formal online learning systems, these interactions carry no prior record of the student, so any estimate of what the student already knows must be inferred from the dialogue itself. We show that this gap is not closed by scaling models alone. Frontier and education-tuned LLMs perform poorly when asked to tutor a student over an extended session, because doing so requires three things at once. The tutor must sequence a curriculum, conduct Socratic dialogue, and infer the student's knowledge state from that dialogue. We ...
| Authors | Sidney Tio, Arunesh Sinha, Pradeep Varakantham |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 10 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 June 2026 |
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