CSTutorBench: Benchmarking Small Language Models as Tutors for Block-Based Programming

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05571v1
• Date: Mon, 06 Jul 2026 19:15:07 GMT
• Title: CSTutorBench: Benchmarking Small Language Models as Tutors for Block-Based Programming
• Abstract summary: Large language models are increasingly explored as AI tutors, yet deploying them in K-12 settings raises concerns around privacy, cost, and reliance on proprietary models.<n>Small language models (SLMs) offer a promising alternative, but selecting the right model for a specific educational context remains difficult.<n>We introduce CSTutorBench, a benchmark for evaluating language models as CS tutors in VEX VR, a block-based robotics environment.
• Score: 0.48342038441006796
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Large language models are increasingly explored as AI tutors, yet deploying them in K-12 settings raises concerns around privacy, cost, and reliance on proprietary models. Small language models (SLMs) offer a promising alternative, but selecting the right model for a specific educational context remains difficult, particularly when the target domain, such as block-based programming, is largely absent from model training data. We introduce CSTutorBench, a benchmark for evaluating language models as CS tutors in VEX VR, a block-based robotics environment. The benchmark comprises 17 scenario-based questions scored against a pedagogical rubric grounded in established tutoring and feedback research, with a human-in-the-loop LLM-as-judge pipeline for evaluation. Preliminary findings across 11 models (4B-120B parameters) reveal that models perform well on surface-level criteria such as vocabulary and tone but struggle with deeper pedagogical behaviors, particularly avoiding answer leakage and engaging with student debugging histories. In our sample, model family and instruction-tuning approach appear to be better predictors of tutoring quality than parameter count alone, though the small number of models limits the strength of this conclusion. A targeted prompt revision grounded in recent educational prompt engineering research improved scores for 10 of 11 models. These results underscore the value of context-specific, pedagogically grounded benchmarks for SLM selection in educational deployment.

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