{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/step-by-step-remediation-of-students","title":"Bridging the Novice-Expert Gap via Models of Decision-Making: A Case Study on Remediating Math Mistakes","arxiv_id":"2310.10648","date":"2023-10-16","proceeding":null,"authors":["Rose E. Wang","Qingyang Zhang","Carly Robinson","Susanna Loeb","Dorottya Demszky"],"abstract":"Scaling high-quality tutoring remains a major challenge in education. Due to growing demand, many platforms employ novice tutors who, unlike experienced educators, struggle to address student mistakes and thus fail to seize prime learning opportunities. Our work explores the potential of large language models (LLMs) to close the novice-expert knowledge gap in remediating math mistakes. We contribute Bridge, a method that uses cognitive task analysis to translate an expert's latent thought process into a decision-making model for remediation. This involves an expert identifying (A) the student's error, (B) a remediation strategy, and (C) their intention before generating a response. We construct a dataset of 700 real tutoring conversations, annotated by experts with their decisions. We evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs on our dataset and find that the expert's decision-making model is critical for LLMs to close the gap: responses from GPT4 with expert decisions (e.g., \"simplify the problem\") are +76% more preferred than without. Additionally, context-sensitive decisions are critical to closing pedagogical gaps: random decisions decrease GPT4's response quality by -97% than expert decisions. Our work shows the potential of embedding expert thought processes in LLM generations to enhance their capability to bridge novice-expert knowledge gaps. Our dataset and code can be found at: \\url{https://github.com/rosewang2008/bridge}.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.10648v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.10648v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"step-by-step-remediation-of-students","repo_url":"https://github.com/rosewang2008/bridge","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"decision-making","task_name":"Decision Making"},{"task_slug":"math","task_name":"Math"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2310.10648","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2310.10648"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/rosewang2008/bridge","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_draft_wrong":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"c1bbb8dc47143179","entry":"get_ngrams","repo":"rosewang2008/bridge","repo_kind":"official","path":"scripts/generate_logodds_analysis.py","file_url":"https://github.com/rosewang2008/bridge/blob/HEAD/scripts/generate_logodds_analysis.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"OUTPUT_MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":true,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"c1bbb8dc47143179"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}