# Developing a Tutoring Dialog Dataset to Optimize LLMs for Educational Use

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.19231 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19231/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [Mixtral of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04088/) (2024)
- [A Prompt Pattern Catalog to Enhance Prompt Engineering with ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11382/) (2023)
- [Recipes for building an open-domain chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13637/) (2020)
- [Challenges and Applications of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10169/) (2023)
- [SODA: Million-scale Dialogue Distillation with Social Commonsense Contextualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10465/) (2022)
- [MathDial: A Dialogue Tutoring Dataset with Rich Pedagogical Properties Grounded in Math Reasoning Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14536/) (2023)
- [The AI Teacher Test: Measuring the Pedagogical Ability of Blender and GPT-3 in Educational Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07540/) (2022)
- [PLACES: Prompting Language Models for Social Conversation Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03269/) (2023)
- [Are LLMs All You Need for Task-Oriented Dialogue?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06556/) (2023)
- [The NCTE Transcripts: A Dataset of Elementary Math Classroom Transcripts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11772/) (2022)
- [The TalkMoves Dataset: K-12 Mathematics Lesson Transcripts Annotated for Teacher and Student Discursive Moves](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09652/) (2022)
- [Opportunities and Challenges in Neural Dialog Tutoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09919/) (2023)
- [Book2Dial: Generating Teacher-Student Interactions from Textbooks for Cost-Effective Development of Educational Chatbots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03307/) (2024)
- [SocialDial: A Benchmark for Socially-Aware Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12026/) (2023)
- [Computationally Identifying Funneling and Focusing Questions in Classroom Discourse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04715/) (2022)
- [Edu-ConvoKit: An Open-Source Library for Education Conversation Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05111/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [LLM-powered Multi-agent Framework for Goal-oriented Learning in Intelligent Tutoring System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15749/) (2025)
- [Opportunities and Challenges of LLMs in Education: An NLP Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22753/) (2025)
- [Leveraging Interview-Informed LLMs to Model Survey Responses: Comparative Insights from AI-Generated and Human Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21997/) (2025)
- [AI Meets Mathematics Education: A Case Study on Supporting an Instructor in a Large Mathematics Class with Context-Aware AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26679/) (2026)
- [ADE: Agentic Data Evolution Framework for Human-Centered Objectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23719/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for scalable educational applications, but their use in dialog-based tutoring systems remains challenging due to the need for effective pedagogical strategies and the high costs associated with expert-curated datasets. Our study explores the use of smaller, more affordable LLMs for one-on-one tutoring in the context of solving reading comprehension problems. We developed a synthetic tutoring dialog dataset, evaluated by human teachers, and fine-tuned a smaller LLM using this dataset. Furthermore, we conducted an interactive experiment comparing the performance of the fine-tuned model with a larger model in real-world tutoring scenarios. Our results show that the fine-tuned model performs on par with the larger model but at a lower cost, demonstrating a viable, cost-effective approach for implementing LLM-based tutoring systems in educational settings.