Eedi's Misconception Graph is now a public good
Eedi's Misconception Graph is now available as an open-source public good through Learning Commons. This means that, as of today, a mapping of more than 8,000 common maths misconceptions, informed by 200 million real student responses, is free for anyone to build on, under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
Many tools can tell you when a student got a question wrong but very few can tell you why. When a student struggles with adding mixed fractions, a common intervention is to show them a video on adding mixed fractions and test them again. What if they get it wrong a second time for an entirely different reason? Yep, they’re served up that same video.
The reasons why a student may stumble - what Eedi calls misconceptions - is knowledge that is not often expressed in a general purpose LLM. While these tools can generate plausible and relevant content in seconds, they often miss opportunities to diagnose the recurring patterns of mistakes that can point the way to more effective interventions.
That's where Eedi’s expertise lies: identifying and resolving misconceptions is what we have spent eleven years building.
The roots of our Misconception Graph can be found in our diagnostic questions: four multi-choice options, one right, three wrong, with every wrong option tied to a specific misconception. Our Learning Design team of former classroom math teachers has spent years writing these distractors, followed by more years of testing diagnostic questions with real students in real classrooms. This expertise paired with data has allowed Eedi to confirm which hypothesised misconceptions students actually hold, which ones cluster, which cascade, and which are rare enough to be able to set aside.
Eedi’s work on misconceptions complements what Learning Commons is building. Their "Knowledge Graph" covers what students should learn and how skills build on one another. Our "Misconception Graph" shows where the learning breaks down. Knowing a student hasn't mastered a learning component tells a developer there's a gap. Knowing which misconception they hold tells them what they can do about it.
We believe that contributing our work as a public good is critical to our mission of demonstrating measurable learning gains for a billion students. We have been delighted to demonstrate that impact for millions of students through Eedi’s own products, and we are thrilled that a part of Eedi’s expertise can now be used by other innovative and mission-driven individuals and organizations to extend that impact.
Moreover, we know that this work is unfinished. We're still discovering misconceptions we never anticipated, and we expect it to change as we — and others - look at more countries, curricula and languages. Open-sourcing the Misconception Graph now will help us to find out where it works and where it doesn't. If you build with it and it fails you somewhere, we'll learn from that too.
Thank you to Learning Commons and to the Gates Foundation, whose support and partnership has made it possible to release this as a public good.
Developers can access it through the Learning Commons platform, via download, API or MCP. If you are working to build more effective maths learning experiences and would like to understand how this can support your work, we’d love to hear from you. I hope you’ll reach out.