Structure and Implementation of New Practical English Textbooks Driven by Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is changing the form of applied English materials from fixed paper sequences to adaptive learning systems that can diagnose learners, recommend tasks, and provide formative feedback. This paper studies the structure and application of a new practical English textbook driven by artificial intelligence. A five-layer architecture is proposed: knowledge mapping, learner profiling, task generation, feedback orchestration, and teacher-side governance. A prototype was tested on 186 non-English-major undergraduates for eight weeks of teaching. Compared with a static digital textbook, the proposed system increased the unit completion accuracy from 72.4% to 84.9%, raised the average score for speaking tasks by 10.8 points, and reduced the teacher's correction time by 31.6%. Therefore, an AI-driven textbook can maintain the stability of the curriculum while providing personalised learning paths, rich practice materials and traceable classroom data.

Archetypes or ability? Clustering for modelling student mathematical competence

Personalised learning systems often assume that mathematical ability is combined of discrete abilities, acquired sequentially and dependent upon first acquiring foundational abilities, and students often report different strengths. In this work, we explore the validity of these assumptions by applying clustering methods to a large dataset of 119,034 students, spanning 13 national-level exams sat in the United Kingdom and collected by the platform. Classifying question results as pass or fail, we use a Bernoulli Mixture Model to search for latent populations which would be indicative of discrete skill-sets. We find that few distinct clusters are present in the data and that the dominant factor is overall student ability, which is further supported by the high degree of linear correlation between the probability distributions of the resulting clusters. Our best performing model achieves an accuracy of 78 percent, competitive with more complicated models in the literature whilst being more explainable. Comparing this models performance with logistic regression baselines and with k-nearest neighbours, we find a small improvement when using performance on each individual question as features. This suggests that whilst overall ability level is the dominant factor for predicting performance, small further personalisation improvements can be made by tailoring to a students exact strengths, but that students do not appear to develop strongly differing ability across topics. Our work offers a national scale test of machine learning in education and offers a new benchmark for the field, demonstrating how explainable models can reach competitive performance

AI-Generated Traces for Novice Programmers: Learning Effects and Learner Differences in a Multi-Institutional Study

Introductory programming (CS1) courses often struggle to support students' understanding of program execution. While visualizations can make execution processes explicit, their effectiveness depends on design and context, and empirical evidence for AI-generated visualizations remains limited. We propose Generated Animated Traces (GATs), AI-generated, analogy-based, narrated animations that coordinate source code, execution state, and conceptual analogies. We conduct a study at two institutions in CS1 courses (Python, N=961; Java N=151) comparing GATs to textual explanations. We measure immediate learning performance and experience, end-of-course engagement and exam performance. Results show that GATs can yield selective benefits for immediate learning, but benefits are context-dependent and short-term. We observe that GATs' influence on performance is moderated by learner engagement profiles. This finding underscores the importance of personalized approaches.

Cognitive Twins: Investigating Personalized Thinking Model Building and Its Performance Enhancement with Human-in-the-Loop

This paper presents the Personalized Thinking Model (PTM), a hierarchical and interpretable learner representation designed for AI supported education. PTM organizes evidence from learner journals into a five-layer structure covering behavioral instances, behavioral patterns, cognitive routines, metacognitive tendencies, and self-system values. PTM is grounded in Marzano's New Taxonomy of Educational Objectives and tries to clone learner's thinking model and build cognitive twin. It was constructed using a pipeline that combines large language model inference (Gemini 2.5 Pro), sentence embeddings, dimensionality reduction, and consensus clustering. This paper evaluates PTM fidelity through three methods applied to 40 participants in a seven-week study. First, automatic evaluation using atomic information point matching yielded an overall F1 score of 74.57% before human-in-the-loop (HITL) refinement and 75.48% after refinement. Second, user evaluation using a Likert scale produced mean ratings of 4.26 and 4.30 on a five-point scale for pre and post-HITL conditions respectively. Third, semantic alignment verification showed that topic coherence increased from 0.436 at the behavioral layer to 0.626 at the core value layer, while lexical overlap with journal vocabulary decreased from 0.114 to 0.007 across those same layers. These results suggest that the PTM produces outputs with acceptable fidelity, was generally perceived by users as reflecting their thinking, and showed a pattern consistent with semantic abstraction across layers.

Personalized Worked Example Generation from Student Code Submissions using Pattern-based Knowledge Components

Adaptive programming practice often relies on fixed libraries of worked examples and practice problems, which require substantial authoring effort and may not correspond well to the logical errors and partial solutions students produce while writing code. As a result, students may receive learning content that does not directly address the concepts they are working to understand, while instructors must either invest additional effort in expanding content libraries or accept a coarse level of personalization. We present an approach for knowledge-component (KC) guided educational content generation using pattern-based KCs extracted from student code. Given a problem statement and student submissions, our pipeline extracts recurring structural KC patterns from students' code through AST-based analysis and uses them to condition a generative model. In this study, we apply this approach to worked example generation, and compare baseline and KC-conditioned outputs through expert evaluation. Results suggest that KC-conditioned generation improves topical focus and relevance to learners' underlying logical errors, providing evidence that KC-based steering of generative models can support personalized learning at scale.