Brief

Two new research papers submitted to arXiv highlight a critical mismatch between how AI tutors are evaluated in benchmarks and how students actually interact with them in real-world educational settings. The first paper introduces metrics for "Chatbot Scaffolding" and "Student Uptake," revealing that students often bypass pedagogical guidance to pursue their own learning goals. The second paper proposes a diagnostic to differentiate between LLM tutors that merely solve problems and those that genuinely teach, finding that current benchmarks do not always align task-solving ability with pedagogical effectiveness. Both studies suggest that future AI tutor evaluations need to account for student agency and diverse learning contexts rather than assuming passive uptake of scaffolding. AI