Calibrating Trustworthiness: Co-Designing Metrics and Visualizations for Evaluating LLMs in Education

Abstract

LLMs are reshaping educational technology, yet evaluating their responses for pedagogical alignment remains underexplored, relying heavily on the expertise of learning engineers building the technology. To bridge this gap, we explore trustworthiness as a structured lens for evaluation, leveraging existing measures of LLM trustworthiness to systematically identify potential pedagogical disruptions. Through a longitudinal co-design process with learning engineers developing an LLM-powered digital textbook, we: (1) co-constructed five trustworthiness metrics comprising 20 measures tailored to pedagogical use; (2) designed visualizations that map trustworthiness violations onto LLM responses; and (3) evaluated how these tools help learning engineers make A/B comparisons of LLM responses. Making trustworthiness explicit increased inter-rater reliability while helping learning engineers resolve conflicting objectives and produce more consistent judgments. We discuss the emergent benefits of trustworthiness as a lens for evaluating LLMs in education and propose new design guidelines for future evaluation tools that enable pedagogically-aligned, LLM-powered learning tools.