Can LLMs Model Incorrect Student Reasoning? A Case Study on Distractor Generation

Title:Can LLMs Model Incorrect Student Reasoning? A Case Study on Distractor Generation

Abstract:Modeling student misconceptions in a realistic manner is critical for AI in education. In this work, we examine how large language models (LLMs) reason about misconceptions when generating distractor answers for multiple-choice questions (MCQs), a task that requires producing answers that are incorrect, yet plausible. We introduce a taxonomy over reasoning strategies for distractor generation that is grounded in learning-science literature and empirical observation, which we apply to LLM-generated reasoning traces across math and science MCQs. On the math dataset, we find that models follow a misconception-based process with potentially high diagnostic value: they recover the correct solution, articulate student errors, simulate them, and select plausible candidates. On the science dataset, on the other hand, they tend to follow a less robust approach based on semantic similarity to the correct answer. We find the most frequent failure modes to be that the model is unable to generate a correct solution or that it discards plausible distractor candidates when performing selection. Providing the correct solution in the prompt yields a relative improvement of 6.4% in alignment with human-authored distractors, highlighting the critical role of anchoring distractor generation to the correct solution. Together, our findings offer an interpretable view of how LLMs model incorrect student reasoning.

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC)

arXiv:2603.15547 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2603.15547v2 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.15547 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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