# SID: Benchmarking Guided Instruction Capabilities in STEM Education with a Socratic Interdisciplinary Dialogues Dataset

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04563 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04563/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [GLM: General Language Model Pretraining with Autoregressive Blank Infilling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10360/) (2021)
- [MathDial: A Dialogue Tutoring Dataset with Rich Pedagogical Properties Grounded in Math Reasoning Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14536/) (2023)
- [CollabLLM: From Passive Responders to Active Collaborators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00640/) (2025)
- [EduChat: A Large-Scale Language Model-based Chatbot System for Intelligent Education](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02773/) (2023)
- [Xiezhi: An Ever-Updating Benchmark for Holistic Domain Knowledge Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05783/) (2023)
- [Enhancing LLM-Based Feedback: Insights from Intelligent Tutoring Systems and the Learning Sciences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04645/) (2024)
- [M3KE: A Massive Multi-Level Multi-Subject Knowledge Evaluation Benchmark for Chinese Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10263/) (2023)
- [Book2Dial: Generating Teacher-Student Interactions from Textbooks for Cost-Effective Development of Educational Chatbots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03307/) (2024)
- [LLM-powered Multi-agent Framework for Goal-oriented Learning in Intelligent Tutoring System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15749/) (2025)
- [Leveraging Language Models for Emotion and Behavior Analysis in Education](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06874/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning based AI tutor for Socratic Interdisciplinary Instruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11930/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Fostering students' abilities for knowledge integration and transfer in complex problem-solving scenarios is a core objective of modern education, and interdisciplinary STEM is a key pathway to achieve this, yet it requires expert guidance that is difficult to scale. While LLMs offer potential in this regard, their true capability for guided instruction remains unclear due to the lack of an effective evaluation benchmark. To address this, we introduce SID, the first benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the higher-order guidance capabilities of LLMs in multi-turn, interdisciplinary Socratic dialogues. Our contributions include a large-scale dataset of 10,000 dialogue turns across 48 complex STEM projects, a novel annotation schema for capturing deep pedagogical features, and a new suite of evaluation metrics (e.g., X-SRG). Baseline experiments confirm that even state-of-the-art LLMs struggle to execute effective guided dialogues that lead students to achieve knowledge integration and transfer. This highlights the critical value of our benchmark in driving the development of more pedagogically-aware LLMs.
