Modernizing Ground Truth: Four Shifts Toward Improving Reliability and Validity in AI in Education

TL;DR

This paper proposes four practical shifts to improve the reliability and validity of ground truth in AI in Education, addressing issues with inter-rater reliability, transparency, bias, and validation.

Contribution

It introduces novel shifts for establishing ground truth, emphasizing diagnostic use of IRR, transparency, bias mitigation, and comprehensive validation in educational AI datasets.

Findings

IRR should be used diagnostically rather than as a strict threshold

Transparency in rater procedures enhances data quality

Bias audits and validation improve annotation reliability

Abstract

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is now widespread in education, yet the efficacy of GenAI systems remains constrained by the quality and interpretation of the labeled data used to train and evaluate them. Studies commonly report inter-rater reliability (IRR), often summarized by a single coefficient such as Cohen's kappa (k), as a gatekeeper to ``ground truth.'' We argue that many educational assessment and practice support settings include challenges, such as high-inference constructs, skewed label distributions, and temporally segmented multimodal data, which yield potential misapplication or misinterpretation of threshold-based heuristics for IRR. The growing use of large language models as annotators and judges introduces risks such as automation bias and circular validation. We propose four practical shifts for establishing ground truth: (1) treat IRR as a diagnostic signal to localize disagreement and refine constructs rather than a mechanical acceptance threshold (e.g., k > 0.8); (2) require transparent reporting of rater expertise, codebook development, reconciliation procedures, and segmentation rules; (3) mitigate risks in LLM annotation through bias audits and verification workflows; and (4) complement agreement statistics with validity and effectiveness evidence for the intended use, including uncertainty-aware labeling (e.g., assigning different labels to the same item to capture nuance), criterion-related checks (e.g., predictive tests to check if labels forecast the intended outcome), and close-the-loop evaluations of whether systems trained on these labels improve learning beyond a reasonable control. We illustrate these shifts through case studies of multimodal tutoring data and provide actionable recommendations toward strengthening the evidence base of labeled AIED datasets.