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Abstract:Parent child tutoring is a collaborative learning setting with asymmetric roles, where parents guide children s problem solving while children engage in understanding and reasoning. However, most LLM based learning systems are designed for either single users or symmetric collaboration, leaving parent child tutoring with distinct instructional roles underexplored. Through a formative study, we find that effective parent child tutoring depends on preserving these distinct roles, with parents guiding the learning process and children remaining actively engaged in reasoning. We also identify recurring challenges when parents struggle to understand problem structure, lack sufficient knowledge to provide support, or encounter communication difficulties that disrupt shared understanding. To address these challenges, we present ParaTutor, a scaffolding system that provides different forms of support to parents and children. ParaTutor supports parents with guidance for tutoring and provides children with visual grounding for problem solving. We evaluate ParaTutor with 23 parent child dyads (children aged 10 to 12) under four tutoring conditions that vary how LLM assistance is delivered. Results show that generic LLM assistance tends to reduce the parent s role in tutoring, whereas ParaTutor better preserves parent led support and sustains children s participation in reasoning. These findings suggest that in multi users learning, the value of LLM support depends not only on model capability but also on how support is distributed across users with different roles. Our work contributes design implications for LLM systems that support family learning.

Submission history

From: Lan Luo [view email]
[v1] Tue, 16 Jun 2026 15:06:05 UTC (29,910 KB)