Unlocking Scientific Concepts: How Effective Are LLM-Generated Analogies for Student Understanding and Classroom Practice?

This paper evaluates LLM-generated analogies for teaching scientific concepts through a two-stage study with high school students and teachers, including controlled in-class tests and classroom field studies in biology and physics. The research finds that LLM-generated analogies can enhance student understanding particularly in biology, but require teacher guidance to prevent over-reliance and overconfidence, leading to the development of a practical system for teachers to generate and refine teaching analogies.

Teaching scientific concepts is essential but challenging, and analogies help students connect new concepts to familiar ideas. Advancements in large language models (LLMs) enable generating analogies, yet their effectiveness in education remains underexplored. In this paper, we first conducted a two-stage study involving high school students and teachers to assess the effectiveness of LLM-generated analogies in biology and physics through a controlled in-class test and a classroom field study. T

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