Erika Fille Legara
2025
Foundations of PEERS: Assessing LLM Role Performance in Educational Simulations
Jasper Meynard Arana
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Kristine Ann M. Carandang
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Ethan Robert Casin
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Christian Alis
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Daniel Stanley Tan
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Erika Fille Legara
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Christopher Monterola
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
In education, peer instruction (PI) is widely recognized as an effective active learning strategy. However, real-world evaluations of PI are often limited by logistical constraints and variability in classroom settings. This paper introduces PEERS (Peer Enhanced Educational Realistic Simulation), a simulation framework that integrates Agent-Based Modeling (ABM), Large Language Models (LLMs), and Bayesian Knowledge Tracing (BKT) to emulate student learning dynamics. As an initial step, this study focuses on evaluating whether LLM-powered agents can effectively assume the roles of teachers and students within the simulation. Human evaluations and topic-based metrics show that LLMs can generate role-consistent and contextually appropriate classroom dialogues. These results serve as a foundational milestone toward building realistic, AI-driven educational simulations. Future work will include simulating the complete PEERS framework and validating its accuracy through actual classroom-based PI sessions. This research aims to contribute a scalable, cost-effective methodology for studying instructional strategies in controlled yet realistic environments.