Rethinking Scaffolding in LLM Tutors: The Interactional Mismatch Between Benchmarks and Real-World Deployments
A central pedagogical value evaluated in AI tutor benchmarks is scaffolding: guiding students through graduated steps toward a solution. Alignment and evaluation methods for embedding scaffolding behaviour into chatbots, however, rest on an implicit assumption: that students will take up the scaffolding and engage in the conversation. To examine whether this assumption holds, we introduce an evaluation pipeline around two metrics - Chatbot Scaffolding and Student Uptake - and apply them across nine datasets of 9,490 chats, spanning AI tutor benchmarks and real-world deployments of educational chatbots. Our analysis reveals that while benchmarks assume a high-scaffolding, high-student-upta...
| Authors | Alexandra Neagu, Jeffrey T. H. Wong, Marcus Messer et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 14 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 June 2026 |
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