# Beyond prior knowledge: The predictive role of knowledge-building in Tutor Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18545 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18545/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Generated Knowledge Prompting for Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08387/) (2021)
- [Impact of Pretraining Term Frequencies on Few-Shot Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07206/) (2022)
- [Teach AI How to Code: Using Large Language Models as Teachable Agents for Programming Education](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14534/) (2023)
- [How to Teach Programming in the AI Era? Using LLMs as a Teachable Agent for Debugging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05292/) (2023)
- [Curiosity Notebook: The Design of a Research Platform for Learning by Teaching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09809/) (2021)
- [Assertion Enhanced Few-Shot Learning: Instructive Technique for Large Language Models to Generate Educational Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03122/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

When adopting the role of a teacher in learning-by-teaching environments, students often struggle to engage in knowledge-building activities, such as providing explanations and addressing misconceptions. Instead, they frequently default to knowledge-telling behaviors, where they simply dictate what they already know or what to do without deeper reflection, thereby limiting learning. Teachable agents, particularly those capable of posing persistent follow-up questions, have been shown to encourage students (tutors) to shift from knowledge-telling to knowledge-building and enhance tutor learning. Tutor learning encompasses two interrelated types of knowledge: conceptual and procedural knowledge. Research has established a bidirectional relationship between these knowledge types, where improvements in one reinforce the other. This study investigates the role of knowledge-building in mediating the bidirectional relationship between procedural and conceptual learning. Our findings revealed a stable bidirectional relationship between procedural and conceptual knowledge, with higher post-test scores observed among students who engaged in knowledge-building, regardless of their procedural and conceptual pre-test performance. This suggests that knowledge-building serves as a crucial mechanism bridging the gap between students with low prior knowledge and higher conceptual and procedural learning gain.