Evidence-Decision-Feedback: Theory-Driven Adaptive Scaffolding For LLM Agents

LLMs offer tremendous opportunities for pedagogical agents to help students construct knowledge and develop problem-solving skills, yet many of these agents operate on a "one-size-fits-all" basis, limiting their ability to personalize support. To address this, we introduce Evidence-Decision-Feedback (EDF), a theoretical framework for adaptive scaffolding with LLM agents. EDF integrates elements of intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) and agentic behavior by organizing interactions around evidentiary inference, pedagogical decision-making, and adaptive feedback. We instantiate EDF through Copa, a Collaborative Peer Agent for STEM+C problem-solving. In an authentic high school classroom study, we show that EDF-guided interactions align feedback with students' demonstrated understanding and task mastery; promote scaffold fading; and support interpretable, evidence-grounded explanations without fostering overreliance.