Personalizing Student-Agent Interactions Using Log-Contextualized Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)

Abstract: Collaborative dialogue offers rich insights into students' learning and critical thinking, which is essential for personalizing pedagogical agent interactions in STEM+C settings. While LLMs facilitate dynamic pedagogical interactions, hallucinations undermine confidence, trust, and instructional value. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grounds LLM outputs in curated knowledge but requires a clear semantic link between user input and a knowledge base, which is often weak in student dialogue. We propose log-contextualized RAG (LC-RAG), which enhances RAG retrieval by using environment logs to contextualize collaborative discourse. Our findings show that LC-RAG improves retrieval over a discourse-only baseline and allows our collaborative peer agent, Copa, to deliver relevant, personalized guidance that supports students' critical thinking and epistemic decision-making in a collaborative computational modeling environment, C2STEM.