AI tutoring can safely and effectively support students: An exploratory RCT in UK classrooms
Authors:
LearnLM Team,
Eedi,
:,
Albert Wang,
Aliya Rysbek,
Andrea Huber,
Anjali Nambiar,
Anna Kenolty,
Ben Caulfield,
Beth Lilley-Draper,
Bibi Groot,
Brian Veprek,
Chelsea Burdett,
Claire Willis,
Craig Barton,
Digory Smith,
George Mu,
Harriet Walters,
Irina Jurenka,
Iris Hulls,
James Stalley-Moores,
Jonathan Caton,
Julia Wilkowski,
Kaiz Alarakyia,
Kevin R. McKee
, et al. (11 additional authors not shown)
Abstract:
One-to-one tutoring is widely considered the gold standard for personalized education, yet it remains prohibitively expensive to scale. To evaluate whether generative AI might help expand access to this resource, we conducted an exploratory randomized controlled trial (RCT) with $N = 165$ students across five UK secondary schools. We integrated LearnLM -- a generative AI model fine-tuned for pedag…
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One-to-one tutoring is widely considered the gold standard for personalized education, yet it remains prohibitively expensive to scale. To evaluate whether generative AI might help expand access to this resource, we conducted an exploratory randomized controlled trial (RCT) with $N = 165$ students across five UK secondary schools. We integrated LearnLM -- a generative AI model fine-tuned for pedagogy -- into chat-based tutoring sessions on the Eedi mathematics platform. In the RCT, expert tutors directly supervised LearnLM, with the remit to revise each message it drafted until they would be satisfied sending it themselves. LearnLM proved to be a reliable source of pedagogical instruction, with supervising tutors approving 76.4% of its drafted messages making zero or minimal edits (i.e., changing only one or two characters). This translated into effective tutoring support: students guided by LearnLM performed at least as well as students chatting with human tutors on each learning outcome we measured. In fact, students who received support from LearnLM were 5.5 percentage points more likely to solve novel problems on subsequent topics (with a success rate of 66.2%) than those who received tutoring from human tutors alone (rate of 60.7%). In interviews, tutors highlighted LearnLM's strength at drafting Socratic questions that encouraged deeper reflection from students, with multiple tutors even reporting that they learned new pedagogical practices from the model. Overall, our results suggest that pedagogically fine-tuned AI tutoring systems may play a promising role in delivering effective, individualized learning support at scale.
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Submitted 29 December, 2025;
originally announced December 2025.
Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities
Authors:
Gheorghe Comanici,
Eric Bieber,
Mike Schaekermann,
Ice Pasupat,
Noveen Sachdeva,
Inderjit Dhillon,
Marcel Blistein,
Ori Ram,
Dan Zhang,
Evan Rosen,
Luke Marris,
Sam Petulla,
Colin Gaffney,
Asaf Aharoni,
Nathan Lintz,
Tiago Cardal Pais,
Henrik Jacobsson,
Idan Szpektor,
Nan-Jiang Jiang,
Krishna Haridasan,
Ahmed Omran,
Nikunj Saunshi,
Dara Bahri,
Gaurav Mishra,
Eric Chu
, et al. (3410 additional authors not shown)
Abstract:
In this report, we introduce the Gemini 2.X model family: Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 2.5 Flash, as well as our earlier Gemini 2.0 Flash and Flash-Lite models. Gemini 2.5 Pro is our most capable model yet, achieving SoTA performance on frontier coding and reasoning benchmarks. In addition to its incredible coding and reasoning skills, Gemini 2.5 Pro is a thinking model that excels at multimodal unde…
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In this report, we introduce the Gemini 2.X model family: Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 2.5 Flash, as well as our earlier Gemini 2.0 Flash and Flash-Lite models. Gemini 2.5 Pro is our most capable model yet, achieving SoTA performance on frontier coding and reasoning benchmarks. In addition to its incredible coding and reasoning skills, Gemini 2.5 Pro is a thinking model that excels at multimodal understanding and it is now able to process up to 3 hours of video content. Its unique combination of long context, multimodal and reasoning capabilities can be combined to unlock new agentic workflows. Gemini 2.5 Flash provides excellent reasoning abilities at a fraction of the compute and latency requirements and Gemini 2.0 Flash and Flash-Lite provide high performance at low latency and cost. Taken together, the Gemini 2.X model generation spans the full Pareto frontier of model capability vs cost, allowing users to explore the boundaries of what is possible with complex agentic problem solving.
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Submitted 19 December, 2025; v1 submitted 7 July, 2025;
originally announced July 2025.