The potential of large language models (LLMs) as AI tutors to facilitate student learning has garnered significant interest, with numerous studies exploring their efficacy in educational contexts. Notably, Wang and Chen (2025) suggests that the relationship between AI model performance and educational outcomes may not always be positively correlated; less accurate AI models can sometimes achieve similar educational impacts to their more accurate counterparts if designed into learning activities appropriately. This underscores the need to evaluate the pedagogical capabilities of LLMs across various dimensions, empowering educators to select appropriate dimensions and LLMs for specific analyses and instructional activities. Addressing this imperative, the BEA 2025 workshop initiated a shared task aimed at comprehensively assessing the pedagogical potential of AI-powered tutors. In this task, our team employed parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) on Llama-3.2-3B to automatically assess the quality of feedback generated by LLMs in student-teacher dialogues, concentrating on mistake identification, mistake location, guidance provision, and guidance actionability. The results revealed that the fine-tuned Llama-3.2-3B demonstrated notable performance, especially in mistake identification, mistake location, and guidance actionability, securing a top-ten ranking across all tracks. These outcomes highlight the robustness and significant promise of the PEFT method in enhancing educational dialogue analysis.

Collaborative argumentation holds significant potential for enhancing students’ learning outcomes within classroom settings. Consequently, researchers have explored the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically analyze argumentation in these contexts. Despite the remarkable performance of deep learning models in this task, their lack of interpretability poses a critical challenge, leading to teachers’ skepticism and limited utilization. To cultivate trust among teachers, this PhD thesis proposal aims to leverage explainable AI techniques to provide explanations for these deep learning models. Specifically, the study develops two deep learning models for automated analysis of argument moves (claim, evidence, and warrant) and specificity levels (low, medium, and high) within collaborative argumentation. To address the interpretability issue, four explainable AI methods are proposed: gradient sensitivity, gradient input, integrated gradient, and LIME. Computational experiments demonstrate the efficacy of these methods in elucidating model predictions by computing word contributions, with LIME delivering exceptional performance. Moreover, a quasi-experiment is designed to evaluate the impact of model explanations on user trust and knowledge, serving as a future study of this PhD proposal. By tackling the challenges of interpretability and trust, this PhD thesis proposal aims to contribute to fostering user trust in AI and facilitating the practical implementation of AI in educational contexts.