Evaluating GenAI for Simplifying Texts for Education: Improving Accuracy and Consistency for Enhanced Readability

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) holds great promise as a tool to support personalized learning. Teachers need tools to efficiently and effectively enhance content readability of educational texts so that they are matched to individual students reading levels, while retaining key details. Large Language Models (LLMs) show potential to fill this need, but previous research notes multiple shortcomings in current approaches. In this study, we introduced a generalized approach and metrics for the systematic evaluation of the accuracy and consistency in which LLMs, prompting techniques, and a novel multi-agent architecture to simplify sixty informational reading passages, reducing each from the twelfth grade level down to the eighth, sixth, and fourth grade levels. We calculated the degree to which each LLM and prompting technique accurately achieved the targeted grade level for each passage, percentage change in word count, and consistency in maintaining keywords and key phrases (semantic similarity). One-sample t-tests and multiple regression models revealed significant differences in the best performing LLM and prompt technique for each of the four metrics. Both LLMs and prompting techniques demonstrated variable utility in grade level accuracy and consistency of keywords and key phrases when attempting to level content down to the fourth grade reading level. These results demonstrate the promise of the application of LLMs for efficient and precise automated text simplification, the shortcomings of current models and prompting methods in attaining an ideal balance across various evaluation criteria, and a generalizable method to evaluate future systems.