Evaluating GenAI for Simplifying Texts for Education: Improving Accuracy and Consistency for Enhanced Readability

Understand

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) holds great promise as a tool to support personalized learning.

• Teachers need tools to efficiently and effectively enhance content readability of educational texts so that they are matched to individual students reading levels, while retaining key details.
• Large Language Models (LLMs) show potential to fill this need, but previous research notes multiple shortcomings in current approaches.
• In this study, we introduced a generalized approach and metrics for the systematic evaluation of the accuracy and consistency in which LLMs, prompting techniques, and a novel multi-agent architecture to simplify sixty informational reading passages, reducing each from the twelfth grade level down to the eighth, sixth, and fourth grade levels.