用多智能体模拟真实课堂,让教育实验可复现、可测试。
AgentSchool: An LLM-Powered Multi-Agent Simulation for Education

- 把学生和教师建模为有认知成长的智能体,用知识图谱和思维流程驱动学习行为。
- 生成了符合社会理论的课堂现象,如小团体形成与意见领袖出现,且教师适应性随模型不同而异。
- 适合教育研究者、AI教育产品设计者,用于验证教学策略与制度创新。
尽管大语言模型正快速进入课堂,但验证教育类AI仍极难:干预作用于正在发展的学习者,其认知与社交轨迹不可逆,而真实实验又慢、伦理受限、机构壁垒高。基于LLM的教育模拟器成为潜在解决方案,但许多仅将学习简化为角色扮演,且只优化复刻现有课堂,反而压制教育改革所需的新颖性。本文提出AgentSchool,一个由大语言模型驱动的多智能体教育模拟器,将学习视为状态转移而非被动响应。该系统包含可成长的认知型学生智能体(具备加权学科知识图谱、思维工作流池与显式误解)、能按最近发展区(ZPD)规划、支架与反思的动态教师智能体,并集成可配置场景生成器,将教学置于正式与非正式学习场域中,以及支持多尺度模拟(解耦交互规模、时间粒度与运行时长)。实验表明,结构化学生智能体产生的掌握程度与误解轨迹更具差异性;教师智能体对比显示,其适应模式依赖模型基础,符合ZPD指导原则。此外,系统生成了符合课堂社会理论的外围参与、小团体现象、攻击性凝聚力与意见领袖涌现等合理轨迹。除了作为教育研究工具,AgentSchool还将教育构建成长期记忆、多智能体协作与组织压力下制度推理的有意义测试平台。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Despite the rapid deployment of LLMs into classrooms, validating educational AI remains uniquely intractable: interventions act on developing learners whose cognitive and social trajectories are irreversibly shaped, while real-world trials are slow, ethically constrained, and institutionally locked. LLM-based educational simulators have emerged as a potential remedy, but many still collapse learning into persona-conditioned role-play and, when optimized only to reproduce existing classrooms, can structurally penalize the institutional novelty that pedagogical reform requires. In this work, we introduce AgentSchool, an LLM-driven multi-agent simulator that models learning as state transition rather than prompted behavior. AgentSchool couples cognitively growable student agents -- equipped with weighted subject knowledge graphs, thinking-workflow pools, and explicit misconceptions -- with adaptive teacher agents that plan, scaffold, and reflect along the Zone of Proximal Development, embedded in a configurable scenery generator that situates instruction within both formal and informal learning fields, and a multi-scale simulator that decouples interaction scale, temporal granularity, and simulation duration. Experiments show that structured student agents produce more differentiated mastery and misconception traces than a baseline simulator, while teacher-agent comparisons show backbone-dependent patterns consistent with ZPD-informed adaptation. Further, AgentSchool generates plausible traces of peripheral participation, clique formation, aggressor-induced cohesion, and opinion-leader emergence consistent with classroom social theories. Beyond its role as an educational research instrument, AgentSchool frames education as a socially meaningful testbed for long-horizon memory, multi-agent coordination, and future institutional reasoning under organizational pressure.
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