Susanna Loeb is a professor of education and director of the National Student Support Accelerator, the Generative AI for Education Hub, and the SCALE Initiative at Stanford University. Her research broadly focuses on education policy and its role in improving educational opportunities for students.

Prof. Susanna Loeb will present her recent work as part of the seminar series “Population Research”, organized by the BiB on the third of March (11:00AM-12:15PM). Further information about her talk and about the seminar series can be found here.

Abstract: Pandemic learning losses created demand for high-quality tutoring at scale, yet many programs rely on novice tutors who often lack the pedagogical expertise to respond effectively to student mistakes. This paper develops and tests Tutor CoPilot, a human-AI system grounded in ReMath, a framework that deconstructs expert teacher decision-making into three stages — error diagnosis, strategy selection, and response generation — derived from think-aloud protocols with experienced teachers. Embedding this expert reasoning into GPT-4 prompts and providing tutors with three suggested responses (which they can select, edit, or ignore) produces improvements in math learning: in a seven-week randomized controlled trial with 783 tutors and ~1,000 students in schools serving student from low-income families, students assigned to treatment tutors were 4 percentage points more likely to pass session exit tickets (ITT), rising to 14 points when CoPilot was actually used (ToT). Effects were largest for lower-rated and less experienced tutors, and NLP analysis of over 241,000 tutor messages confirms a shift toward higher-quality pedagogical strategies. At roughly $20 per tutor per year, the approach offers a promising, scalable, cost-effective model for augmenting human expertise with AI while preserving human agency and judgment.