Author: IBL News

IBL News | New York

Google’s Gemini introduced yesterday its “education mode”, a Socratic-style AI companion tutor similar to OpenAI’s Study Mode and Anthropic’s Claude for Education, both recently launched.

Like the other personalized assistants, “Guided Learning in Gemini” is designed to avoid immediately spitting out quick answers and ask probing, open-ended questions, adapt explanations to the learner’s level, walk them through step-by-step reasoning, and use videos, diagrams, visuals, and quizzes to reinforce concepts.

Essentially, they all guide users through problems with Socratic prompts, scaffolded reasoning, and adaptive feedback across a range of subjects and skill levels, instead of just handing over the answer.

These AI companies said that these AI assistants are built with input from educators, pedagogical experts, and learning scientists, alongside feedback from college students.

“Guided Learning is designed to be a partner in teaching, built on the core principle that real learning is an active, constructive process. It encourages students to move beyond answers and develop their own thinking by guiding them with questions that foster critical thought. To make it simple to bring this approach into their classrooms, we created a dedicated link that educators can post directly in Google Classroom or share with students,” explained the search giant.

However, independent experts argue that these mentors show many limitations, such as minimal persistent memory, early over-structuring, and a tendency to agree too quickly.

In the educational area, Gemini is already getting a good response with LearnLM, a family of models fine-tuned for learning and grounded in educational research.