SCRIBE: Structured Chain Reasoning for Interactive Behaviour Explanations using Tool Calling

Language models can be used to provide interactive, personalized student feedback in educational settings.However, real-world deployment faces three key challenges: privacy concerns, limited computational resources, and the need for pedagogically valid responses.These constraints require small, open-source models that can run locally and reliably ground their outputs in correct information.We introduce SCRIBE, a framework for multi-hop, tool-augmented reasoning designed to generate valid responses to student questions about feedback reports.SCRIBE combines domainspecific tools with a self-reflective inference pipeline that supports iterative reasoning, tool use, and error recovery.We distil these capabilities into 3B and 8B models via two-stage LoRA fine-tuning on synthetic GPT-4o-generated data.Evaluation with a human-aligned GPT-Judge and a user study with 108 students shows that 8B-SCRIBE models achieve comparable or superior quality to much larger models in key dimensions such as relevance and actionability, while being perceived on par with GPT-4o and Llama-3.3 70B by students.These findings demonstrate the viability of SCRIBE for low-resource, privacy-sensitive educational applications.How can I improve my performance to pass the course?Useful