Findings of the BEA 2025 Shared Task on Pedagogical Ability Assessment of AI-powered Tutors

TL;DR

This paper reports on the BEA 2025 shared task evaluating AI tutors' pedagogical abilities, highlighting current performance levels, approaches used, and the need for further improvement in AI-based educational dialogue systems.

Contribution

It introduces a shared task with multiple tracks for assessing AI tutor responses, providing a benchmark dataset and analysis of current model performances.

Findings

Best F1 score for mistake identification: 71.81

Guidance provision F1 score: 58.34

Tutor identification accuracy: 96.98

Abstract

This shared task has aimed to assess pedagogical abilities of AI tutors powered by large language models (LLMs), focusing on evaluating the quality of tutor responses aimed at student's mistake remediation within educational dialogues. The task consisted of five tracks designed to automatically evaluate the AI tutor's performance across key dimensions of mistake identification, precise location of the mistake, providing guidance, and feedback actionability, grounded in learning science principles that define good and effective tutor responses, as well as the track focusing on detection of the tutor identity. The task attracted over 50 international teams across all tracks. The submitted models were evaluated against gold-standard human annotations, and the results, while promising, show that there is still significant room for improvement in this domain: the best results for the four pedagogical ability assessment tracks range between macro F1 scores of 58.34 (for providing guidance) and 71.81 (for mistake identification) on three-class problems, with the best F1 score in the tutor identification track reaching 96.98 on a 9-class task. In this paper, we overview the main findings of the shared task, discuss the approaches taken by the teams, and analyze their performance. All resources associated with this task are made publicly available to support future research in this critical domain.