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Yael Haramaty

Publications and source records attributed to Yael Haramaty.

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Harnessing Generative UI for Education: Tailored Learning Interactives

It is well established that students learn best through active engagement, particularly via interactive experiences tied to real-world concepts. Creating such experiences, however, typically requires labor-intensive design, costly development, and continuous teacher guidance to achieve measurably effective outcomes. Recent advances in generative UI open the door for a future of practice where the creation of tailored interactive experiences is automated. However, off-the-shelf models lack optimization for pedagogical precision and learning principles, often yielding unsatisfactory results for complex pedagogical constructs. To address these limitations, we present learning interactives, a structured framework leveraging the generative UI capabilities of Gemini to construct effective customized interactive simulations. We evaluate our approach through both an initial study with educators as well as a pedagogical rating of a varied set of simulations by expert teachers.

cs.CY

Towards Scalable Measurement of Durable Skills

Durable skills, such as collaboration, creativity and critical thinking, are instrumental to success in the modern workforce. Yet, measuring these skills remains a persistent challenge. Moreover, because what is not measured is often not taught, these skills are often overlooked in mainstream educational curricula. Designing effective assessments for these skills necessitates balancing two often-conflicting requirements: ecological validity and psychometric rigor. On the one hand, the assessment environment should emulate natural real-world human interaction between humans. On the other hand, it should be scalable, controllable and reproducible. Here we argue that LLMs can be used to better capture both of these aims. Concretely, we develop a framework where the subject converses with AI teammates in a way that resembles human-human interaction for authenticity, while also offering the psychometric control required for informative and robust assessment. Importantly, the AI participants not only act as teammates but also, in an "Executive LLM" setup, steer the conversation towards eliciting a high density of observable evidence for skill proficiency. We complement this with an AI evaluator that can be used to measure skill proficiency in such interactions. We evaluate our assessment protocol based on transcripts of interactions of human participants with our AI framework, for multiple durable skills. For the skill of creativity, we further demonstrate the efficacy of an autorater for evaluating complex tasks performed by real students. Our analysis shows that the use of the Executive LLM significantly increases elicited evidence and that LLM-automated scoring of conversations largely agrees with that of expert annotators. This research demonstrates the utility of orchestrated LLMs approaches for measuring complex social and cognitive constructs in a scalable and controllable manner.

cs.HC

An Experimental Evaluation of an AI-Powered Interactive Learning Platform

Generative AI, which is capable of transforming static content into dynamic learning experiences, holds the potential to revolutionize student engagement in educational contexts. However, questions still remain around whether or not these tools are effective at facilitating student learning. In this research, we test the effectiveness of an AI-powered platform incorporating multiple representations and assessment through Learn Your Way, an experimental research platform that transforms textbook chapters into dynamic visual and audio representations. Through a between-subjects, mixed methods experiment with 60 US-based students, we demonstrate that students who used Learn Your Way had a more positive learning experience and had better learning outcomes compared to students learning the same content through a digital textbook. These findings indicate that AI-driven tools, capable of providing choice among interactive representations of content, constitute an effective and promising method for enhancing student learning.

cs.HC

Towards an AI-Augmented Textbook

Textbooks are a cornerstone of education, but they have a fundamental limitation: they are a one-size-fits-all medium. Any new material or alternative representation requires arduous human effort, so that textbooks cannot be adapted in a scalable manner. We present an approach for transforming and augmenting textbooks using generative AI, adding layers of multiple representations and personalization while maintaining content integrity and quality. We refer to the system built with this approach as Learn Your Way. We report pedagogical evaluations of the different transformations and augmentations, and present the results of a a randomized control trial, highlighting the advantages of learning with Learn Your Way over regular textbook usage.

cs.CY

Evaluating Gemini in an arena for learning

Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to transform education, but the research community lacks a robust, general benchmark to evaluate AI models for learning. To assess state-of-the-art support for educational use cases, we ran an "arena for learning" where educators and pedagogy experts conduct blind, head-to-head, multi-turn comparisons of leading AI models. In particular, $N = 189$ educators drew from their experience to role-play realistic learning use cases, interacting with two models sequentially, after which $N = 206$ experts judged which model better supported the user's learning goals. The arena evaluated a slate of state-of-the-art models: Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, GPT-4o, and OpenAI o3. Excluding ties, experts preferred Gemini 2.5 Pro in 73.2% of these match-ups -- ranking it first overall in the arena. Gemini 2.5 Pro also demonstrated markedly higher performance across key principles of good pedagogy. Altogether, these results position Gemini 2.5 Pro as a leading model for learning.

cs.CY