Comparing Human Role-Players and LLM-Simulated Clients in Online Counselling Training: An Analysis of Counselling Patterns
- This study investigates the capabilities of Large Language Models to simulate counselling clients in educational roleplays in comparison to human role-players. Initially, we recorded role-playing sessions, where novice counsellors interacted with human peers acting as clients, followed by role-plays between humans and clients simulated by Mistrals Mixtral 8x7b using 4-bit quantization. These interactions were analysed with a counselling communication pattern system at sentence level. We investigated two key questions: (1) to what extent LLM-generated responses replicate authentic conversational dynamics and (2) whether counsellors’ communication behaviour differs when interacting with human versus LLM-simulated clients. The findings highlight both similarities and differences in the application of counselling patterns across scenarios, showing the potential of LLM-based role-playing exercises to enhance counselling competencies and to identify areas for further refinement in virtual client simulations.
| Author: | Eric RudolphORCiD, Phillip Steigerwald, Jens Albrecht |
|---|---|
| DOI: | https://doi.org/eric.ed.gov/?id=ED675583 |
| ISBN: | 978-1-7336736-6-2 |
| Parent Title (English): | Proceedings of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining |
| Publisher: | International Educational Data Mining Society |
| Document Type: | conference proceeding (article) |
| Language: | English |
| Date of first Publication: | 2025/07/20 |
| Reviewed: | Begutachtet/Reviewed |
| Release Date: | 2026/04/15 |
| Tag: | Artificial Intelligence; Counselling Training; Educational Technology; Large Language Models; Role Playing |
| Pagenumber: | 381-387 |
| Konferenzangabe: | International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM), 18th, 2025, Palermo, Italy |
| institutes: | Institut für e-Beratung |
| Zentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (KIZ) | |
| Research Themes: | Digitalisierung & Künstliche Intelligenz |
| Licence (German): | Creative Commons - CC BY - Namensnennung 4.0 International |

