ParaTutor: Coordinating Parent and Child Math Tutoring through Role Separated LLM Scaffolding

Abstract

Parent and child tutoring is a collaborative learning setting with asymmetric roles. Parents guide children s problem solving, while children are expected to remain actively engaged in understanding and reasoning. However, most LLM based learning systems are designed for single users or relatively symmetric collaboration, leaving parent and child tutoring with distinct instructional roles underexplored. Through a formative study, we found that parent and child math tutoring was often disrupted by cognitive misalignment, emotional escalation, and method mismatch. To address these challenges, we present ParaTutor, a multiple agents LLM based scaffolding system for home math word problem tutoring. ParaTutor distributes support across user roles by providing parents with strategy, language, repair, and phase scaffolds, while providing children with visual grounding for problem interpretation. We evaluated ParaTutor with 23 parent and child dyads (children aged 10 to 12) across four tutoring conditions that varied how LLM assistance was delivered. Results show that generic LLM assistance often provided useful explanations but did not consistently support parent led tutoring or children s active reasoning. In contrast, ParaTutor helped redistribute tutoring work across parents and children, increased children s engagement with word problems, supported shared understanding through visual grounding, and helped parents translate LLM generated methods into child facing tutoring moves. These findings suggest that in family learning, the value of LLM support depends not only on model capability, but also on how support is coordinated across users with different roles. Our work contributes design implications for LLM systems that support role sensitive scaffolding in parent and child learning.