[2603.26673] Can AI be a Teaching Partner? Evaluating ChatGPT, Gemini, and DeepSeek across Three Teaching Strategies

Computer Science > Computers and Society arXiv:2603.26673 (cs) [Submitted on 24 Feb 2026] Title:Can AI be a Teaching Partner? Evaluating ChatGPT, Gemini, and DeepSeek across Three Teaching Strategies Authors:Talita de Paula Cypriano de Souza, Shruti Mehta, Matheus Arataque Uema, Luciano Bernardes de Paula, Seiji Isotani View a PDF of the paper titled Can AI be a Teaching Partner? Evaluating ChatGPT, Gemini, and DeepSeek across Three Teaching Strategies, by Talita de Paula Cypriano de Souza and 3 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:There are growing promises that Large Language Models (LLMs) can support students' learning by providing explanations, feedback, and guidance. However, despite their rapid adoption and widespread attention, there is still limited empirical evidence regarding the pedagogical skills of LLMs. This article presents a comparative study of popular LLMs, namely, ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Gemini, acting as teaching agents. An evaluation protocol was developed, focusing on three pedagogical strategies: Examples, Explanations and Analogies, and the Socratic Method. Six human judges conducted the evaluations in the context of teaching the C programming language to beginners. The results indicate that LLM models exhibited similar interaction patterns in the pedagogical strategies of Examples and Explanations and Analogies. In contrast, for the Socratic Method, the models showed greater sensitivity to the pedagogical strategy and the initial prom...