EduThink4AI: Translating Educational Critical Thinking into Multi-Agent LLM Systems

Abstract: LLMs have demonstrated significant potential as educational tutoring agents, capable of tailoring hints, orchestrating lessons, and grading with near-human finesse across various academic domains. However, current LLM-based educational systems exhibit critical limitations in promoting genuine critical thinking, failing on over one-third of multi-hop questions with counterfactual premises, and remaining vulnerable to adversarial prompts that trigger biased or factually incorrect responses. To address these gaps, we propose EDU-Prompting, a novel multi-agent framework that bridges established educational critical thinking theories with LLM agent design to generate critical, bias-aware explanations while fostering diverse perspectives. Our systematic evaluation across theoretical benchmarks and practical college-level critical writing scenarios demonstrates that EDU-Prompting significantly enhances both content truthfulness and logical soundness in AI-generated educational responses. The framework's modular design enables seamless integration into existing prompting frameworks and educational applications, allowing practitioners to directly incorporate critical thinking catalysts that promote analytical reasoning and introduce multiple perspectives without requiring extensive system modifications.