Cognitive modeling of exact student responses is hardest for multi-select problems and rare-error answers, with select-all accuracy of only 12-15% and cognitive accuracy dropping to as low as 3.7% when answers are incorrect¶
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Evidence · 1 study (2 entries) · designr2·q2
Currency · newest study 2026 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person · recheck by 2029: tool and model accuracy changes quickly
Subclaims¶
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q2 i? All models achieve only 12-15% accuracy on select-all problems (baseline approximately 2.9%), and cognitive accuracy for incorrect answers drops as low as 3.7% (Llama-3.3-70B). → Eamon Worden 2026
q2 i? Fill-in-the-blank cognitive modeling reaches 40-50% accuracy despite near-zero random chance, suggesting some genuine capability to anticipate what students write. → Eamon Worden 2026 (2)
Evidence¶
Eamon Worden 2026¶
Eamon Worden, Cristina Heffernan, Neil Heffernan, and Shashank Sonkar. (2026). FoundationalASSIST: An Educational Dataset for Foundational Knowledge Tracing and Pedagogical Grounding of LLMs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00070 doi:10.48550/arxiv.2602.00070
q2 · i? · design · r2
Cognitive modeling accuracy broken down by problem type (Table 6) and by correctness (Table 7) in Sections 6.1.3-6.1.4. The article reports the quoted 12-15% select-all range and notes cognitive accuracy drops to 13.5% for Qwen3 Instruct and "just 3.7% when the student's answer does not match the correct answer".
"All models achieve only 12-15% accuracy on “select all” problems, exceeding the random baseline of approximately 2.9% but not performing reliably well."
Eamon Worden 2026 (2)¶
Eamon Worden, Cristina Heffernan, Neil Heffernan, and Shashank Sonkar. (2026). FoundationalASSIST: An Educational Dataset for Foundational Knowledge Tracing and Pedagogical Grounding of LLMs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00070
q2 · i? · design · r2
Same Section 6.1.3 analysis of cognitive modeling by problem type, where fill-in problems have essentially zero random baseline. The article quotes the "40-50%" fill-in performance as evidence of some understanding of common student responses.
"The fill-in-the-blank performance of 40-50% is particularly notable: for open-ended numerical responses where random chance is essentially zero, models demonstrate genuine capability to anticipate what students will write."
Discussion¶
Related Claims¶
- LLMs predict common distractors above chance but fall 15 percentage points below chance at predicting which errors students rarely select — related
- LLM error simulation rarely fails, but the model is less likely to reproduce a targeted distractor on problems with longer correct solutions — related
- LLMs perform competently at comparing item difficulty but fall below random chance on comparing item discrimination — related
Page metadata
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
type |
claim |
id |
cognitive-modeling-by-problem-type |
title |
Cognitive modeling of exact student responses is hardest for multi-select problems and rare-error answers, with select-all accuracy of only 12-15% and cognitive accuracy dropping to as low as 3.7% when answers are incorrect |
description |
Cognitive modeling of exact student responses is hardest for multi-select problems and rare-error answers, with select-all accuracy of only 12-15% and cognitive accuracy dropping to as low as 3.7% when answers are inc... |
status |
review |
evidence_strength |
moderate |
newest_evidence |
2026 |
recheck_by |
2029 |
generated |
by process:wiki-ingest on 2026-10-12 |
trust |
unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content |
sources |
2 — eamon-worden-2026, eamon-worden-2026-2 |
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