Towards Robust Evaluation of STEM Education: Leveraging MLLMs in Project-Based Learning

TL;DR

This paper introduces PBLBench, a new benchmark for evaluating multimodal large language models in project-based STEM education, emphasizing complex reasoning and expert validation to improve AI support for teachers.

Contribution

The paper presents PBLBench, a comprehensive benchmark with expert-validated ground truth, to evaluate MLLMs in complex, real-world educational tasks, addressing current evaluation limitations.

Findings

Most advanced models achieve only 59% accuracy

PBLBench challenges models with domain-specific, long-context reasoning

The benchmark highlights significant gaps in current MLLM capabilities

Abstract

Project-Based Learning (PBL) involves a variety of highly correlated multimodal data, making it a vital educational approach within STEM disciplines. With the rapid development of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), researchers have begun exploring their potential to enhance tasks such as information retrieval, knowledge comprehension, and data generation in educational settings. However, existing benchmarks fall short in providing both a free-form output structure and a rigorous human expert validation process, limiting their effectiveness in evaluating real-world educational tasks. Additionally, few methods have developed automated pipelines to assist with the complex responsibilities of teachers leveraging MLLMs, largely due to model hallucination and instability, which lead to unreliable implementation. To address this gap, we introduce PBLBench, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate complex reasoning grounded in domain-specific knowledge and long-context understanding, thereby challenging models with tasks that closely resemble those handled by human experts. To establish reliable ground truth, we adopt the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), utilizing expert-driven pairwise comparisons to derive structured and weighted evaluation criteria. We assess the performance of 15 leading MLLMs/LLMs using PBLBench and demonstrate that even the most advanced models achieve only 59% rank accuracy, underscoring the significant challenges presented by this benchmark. We believe PBLBench will serve as a catalyst for the development of more capable AI agents, ultimately aiming to alleviate teacher workload and enhance educational productivity.