DrawSim-PD: Simulating Student Science Drawings to Support NGSS-Aligned Teacher Diagnostic Reasoning

TL;DR

DrawSim-PD is a generative framework that creates realistic, NGSS-aligned student science drawings with pedagogical imperfections, aiding teacher diagnostic training without privacy concerns.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, structured approach to simulate diverse student artifacts with controllable imperfections for teacher professional development.

Findings

Over 84% positive alignment with NGSS expectations

Generated artifacts effectively support interpretation of student thinking

Open infrastructure facilitates research in visual assessment

Abstract

Developing expertise in diagnostic reasoning requires practice with diverse student artifacts, yet privacy regulations prohibit sharing authentic student work for teacher professional development (PD) at scale. We present DrawSim-PD, the first generative framework that simulates NGSS-aligned, student-like science drawings exhibiting controllable pedagogical imperfections to support teacher training. Central to our approach are apability profiles--structured cognitive states encoding what students at each performance level can and cannot yet demonstrate. These profiles ensure cross-modal coherence across generated outputs: (i) a student-like drawing, (ii) a first-person reasoning narrative, and (iii) a teacher-facing diagnostic concept map. Using 100 curated NGSS topics spanning K-12, we construct a corpus of 10,000 systematically structured artifacts. Through an expert-based feasibility evaluation, K--12 science educators verified the artifacts' alignment with NGSS expectations (>84% positive on core items) and utility for interpreting student thinking, while identifying refinement opportunities for grade-band extremes. We release this open infrastructure to overcome data scarcity barriers in visual assessment research.