One-to-one tutoring is one of the most efficient methods of teaching. Following the rise in popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs), there have been efforts to use them to create conversational tutoring systems, which can make the benefits of one-to-one tutoring accessible to everyone. However, current LLMs are primarily trained to be helpful assistants and thus lack crucial pedagogical skills. For example, they often quickly reveal the solution to the student and fail to plan for a richer multi-turn pedagogical interaction. To use LLMs in pedagogical scenarios, they need to be steered towards using effective teaching strategies: a problem we introduce as Pedagogical Steering and believe to be crucial for the efficient use of LLMs as tutors. We address this problem by formalizing a concept of tutoring strategy, and introducing StratL, an algorithm to model a strategy and use prompting to steer the LLM to follow this strategy. As a case study, we create a prototype tutor for high school math following Productive Failure (PF), an advanced and effective learning design. To validate our approach in a real-world setting, we run a field study with 17 high school students in Singapore. We quantitatively show that StratL succeeds in steering the LLM to follow a Productive Failure tutoring strategy. We also thoroughly investigate the existence of spillover effects on desirable properties of the LLM, like its ability to generate human-like answers. Based on these results, we highlight the challenges in Pedagogical Steering and suggest opportunities for further improvements. We further encourage follow-up research by releasing a dataset of Productive Failure problems and the code of our prototype and algorithm.

本研究解决了大型语言模型（LLM）在教学中的有效使用问题，提出了“教学引导”概念，以改善LLM的教学能力。通过开发StratL算法并实施“产品性失败”策略的原型辅导系统，研究表明该算法能够有效引导LLM执行教学策略，并验证了其在生成类人回答方面的溢出效应。本文强调了教学引导中的挑战并提出改进机会。 

朝着大型语言模型的教学引导：以建模产品性失败为案例研究