Reinforcement Learning for Special Education: Aligning LLM Tutors to Diverse Learners through Disability-Adaptive Training
Large language models are increasingly deployed as intelligent tutors, yet research on aligning them for special education remains absent. Recent work has applied reinforcement learning to LLM tutors, but these methods target a generic learner in a single domain (mathematics) and do not address the cognitive and communicative diversity of learners with disabilities. We introduce \emph{Special-R1}, a framework that extends pedagogical RL to special education through two components: (1) a two-dimensional adaptive system prompt that couples a difficulty-based support level with a disability-specific teaching style across five disability profiles; and (2) a persona-aware Thinking Reward whose judge rubric is conditioned on the learner's disability profile. On a persona-augmented test set of 690 multi-turn dialogues, our full model raises persona-aware Fit from 6.75 (generic baseline) to 8.40 (+1.65) and SPED-rubric Helpfulness from 0.720 to 0.768, leading on the four-component Total (2.911, +0.064 over the runner-up) while remaining within 0.01 of the strongest variant on the out-of-domain OpenLearnLM benchmark (8.53). Ablations show that the Thinking Reward becomes effective only in combination with adaptive prompting, and that residual weakness on specific learning disability in mathematics motivates targeted multimodal extensions.