The Diligent but Brittle Student Inside Every LLM
If you put a large language model in a classroom for a year, what kind of student would it become? According to Simulating Human-Like Learning Dynamics with LLM-Empowered Agents, the answer isn’t flattering: most base LLMs act like “diligent but brittle surface learners”—hardworking, seemingly capable, but unable to generalize deeply. From Psych Lab to AI Lab Educational psychology has spent decades classifying learners into profiles like deep learners (intrinsically motivated, reflective, conceptual) and surface learners (extrinsically motivated, test-oriented, shortcut-prone). The authors built LearnerAgent, a multi-agent framework grounded in these theories, and dropped four AI ‘students’ into a simulated high school English class: ...