Identifying High-Confidence Social Biases in LLMs for Trustworthy Conversational Tutoring Agents
arXiv:2606.01584v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conversational tutoring agents have been shown to improve learning engagement and student outcomes, and large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in these systems to provide scalable, personalized feedback. However, LLMs may perpetuate or amplify stereotypical social biases, posing particular risks in educational settings. In this study, we evaluate LLMs in conversational tutoring scenarios to identify high-confidence social biases, instances where models are unable to identify biased judgments in tutoring conversations while maintaining strong confidence in their assessments, potentially affecting their reasoning and the feedback they provide to learners. We present a new dataset generation method that enables bias evaluation under naturalistic instructional conditions by regenerating student-AI tutor interactions and introducing turns with controlled bias derived from a benchmark dataset. Using this data, we assess multiple L