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1. Deep Hierarchical Knowledge Tracing

   Wang, T. ; Ma, F. ; Gao, J. ( January 2019 , Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Educational Data Mining)

   Knowledge tracing is an essential and challenging task in intelligent tutoring systems, whose goal is to estimate students’ knowledge state based on their responses to questions. Although many models for knowledge tracing task are developed, most of them depend on either concepts or items as input and ignore the hierarchical structure of items, which provides valuable information for the prediction of student learning results. In this paper, we propose a novel deep hierarchical knowledge tracing (DHKT) model exploiting the hierarchical structure of items. In the proposed DHKT model, the hierarchical relations between concepts and items are modeled by the hinge loss on the inner product between the learned concept embeddings and item embeddings. Then the learned embeddings are fed into a neural network to model the learning process of students, which is used to make predictions. The prediction loss and the hinge loss are minimized simultaneously during training process. 

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2. Context-Aware Attentive Knowledge Tracing

   Ghosh, Aritra ; Heffernan, Neil ; Lan, Andrew S. ( August 2020 , KDD '20: Proceedings of the 26th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining)

   Knowledge tracing (KT) refers to the problem of predicting future learner performance given their past performance in educational applications. Recent developments in KT using flexible deep neural network-based models excel at this task. However, these models often offer limited interpretability, thus making them insufficient for personalized learning, which requires using interpretable feedback and actionable recommendations to help learners achieve better learning outcomes. In this paper, we propose attentive knowledge tracing (AKT), which couples flexible attention-based neural network models with a series of novel, interpretable model components inspired by cognitive and psychometric models. AKT uses a novel monotonic attention mechanism that relates a learner’s future responses to assessment questions to their past responses; attention weights are computed using exponential decay and a context-aware relative distance measure, in addition to the similarity between questions. Moreover, we use the Rasch model to regularize the concept and question embeddings; these embeddings are able to capture individual differences among questions on the same concept without using an excessive number of parameters. We conduct experiments on several real-world benchmark datasets and show that AKT outperforms existing KT methods (by up to 6% in AUC in some cases) on predicting future learner responses. We also conduct several case studies and show that AKT exhibits excellent interpretability and thus has potential for automated feedback and personalization in real-world educational settings. 

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3. Graph-enhanced multi-activity knowledge tracing

   Zhao, Siqian ; Sahebi, Shaghayegh ( January 2022 , European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge)

   Knowledge tracing (KT), or modeling student knowledge state given their past activity sequence, is one of the essential tasks in online education systems. Research has demonstrated that students benefit from both assessed (e.g., solving problems, which can be graded) and non-assessed learning activities (e.g., watching video lectures, which cannot be graded), and thus, modeling student knowledge from multiple types of activities with knowledge transfer between them is crucial. However, current approaches to multi-activity knowledge tracing cannot capture coarse-grained between-type associations and are primarily evaluated by predicting student performance on upcoming assessed activities (labeled data). Therefore, they are inadequate in incorporating signals from non-assessed activities (unlabeled data). We propose Graph-enhanced Multi-activity Knowledge Tracing (GMKT) that addresses these challenges by jointly learning a fine-grained recurrent memory-augmented student knowledge model and a coarse-grained graph neural network. In GMKT, we formulate multi-activity knowledge tracing as a semi-supervised sequence learning problem and optimize for accurate student performance and activity type at each time step. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model by experimenting on three real-world datasets. 

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4. Deep Knowledge Tracing using Temporal Convolutional Networks

   Ait Khayi, N. ( January 2021 , Proceedings of the Workshop Artificial Intelligence for Education (IJCAI 2021)))

   null (Ed.)

   The knowledge tracing (KT) task consists of predicting students’ future performance on instructional activities given their past performance. Recently, deep learning models used to solve this task yielded relative excellent prediction results relative to prior approaches. Despite this success, the majority of these models ignore relevant information that can be used to enhance the knowledge tracing performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose a generic framework that also accounts for the engagement level of students, the difficulty level of the instructional activities, and the natural language processing embeddings of the text of each concept. Furthermore, to capture the fact that students’ knowledge states evolve over time we employ a LSTM-based model. Then, we pass such sequences of knowledge states to a Temporal Convolutional Network to predict future performance. Several empirical experiments have been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed framework for KT using Cognitive Tutor datasets. Experimental results showed the superior performance of our proposed model over many existing deep KT models. And AUC of 96.57% has been achieved on the Algebra 2006-2007 dataset. 

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5. Transition-Aware Multi-Activity Knowledge Tracing

   https://doi.org/10.1109/BigData55660.2022.10020617  

   Zhao, Siqian ; Wang, Chunpai ; Sahebi, Shaghayegh ( December 2022 , 2022 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data))

   Accurate modeling of student knowledge is essential for large-scale online learning systems that are increasingly used for student training. Knowledge tracing aims to model student knowledge state given the student's sequence of learning activities. Modern Knowledge tracing (KT) is usually formulated as a supervised sequence learning problem to predict students' future practice performance according to their past observed practice scores by summarizing student knowledge state as a set of evolving hidden variables. Because of this formulation, many current KT solutions are not fit for modeling student learning from non-assessed learning activities with no explicit feedback or score observation (e.g., watching video lectures that are not graded). Additionally, these models cannot explicitly represent the dynamics of knowledge transfer among different learning activities, particularly between the assessed (e.g., quizzes) and non-assessed (e.g., video lectures) learning activities. In this paper, we propose Transition-Aware Multi-activity Knowledge Tracing (TAMKOT), which models knowledge transfer between learning materials, in addition to student knowledge, when students transition between and within assessed and non-assessed learning materials. TAMKOT is formulated as a deep recurrent multi-activity learning model that explicitly learns knowledge transfer by activating and learning a set of knowledge transfer matrices, one for each transition type between student activities. Accordingly, our model allows for representing each material type in a different yet transferrable latent space while maintaining student knowledge in a shared space. We evaluate our model on three real-world publicly available datasets and demonstrate TAMKOT's capability in predicting student performance and modeling knowledge transfer. 

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