Zhai, X; Latif, E; Liu, N; Biswas, G; Yin, Y
(Ed.)
Collaborative dialogue offers rich insights into students’ learning and critical thinking, which is essential for personalizing pedagogical agent interactions in STEM+C settings. While large language models (LLMs) facilitate dynamic pedagogical interactions, hallucinations undermine confidence, trust, and instructional value. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grounds LLM outputs in curated knowledge, but requires a clear semantic link between user input and a knowledge base, which is often weak in student dialogue. We propose log-contextualized RAG (LC-RAG), which enhances RAG retrieval by using the environment logs to contextualize collaborative discourse. Our findings show that LCRAG improves retrieval over a discourse-only baseline and allows our collaborative peer agent, Copa, to deliver relevant, personalized guidance that supports students’ critical thinking and epistemic decision-making in a collaborative computational modeling environment, C2STEM.
more »
« less
An official website of the United States government
