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Knowledge tracing refers to a family of methods that estimate each student’s knowledge component/skill mastery level from their past responses to questions. One key limitation of most existing knowledge tracing methods is that they can only estimate an overall knowledge level of a student per knowledge component/skill since they analyze only the (usually binary-valued) correctness of student responses. Therefore, it is hard to use them to diagnose specific student errors. In this paper, we extend existing knowledge tracing methods beyond correctness prediction to the task of predicting the exact option students select in multiple choice questions. We quantitatively evaluate the performance of our option tracing methods on two large-scale student response datasets. We also qualitatively evaluate their ability in identifying common student errors in the form of clusters of incorrect options across different questions that correspond to the same error. 

We propose VarFA, a variational inference factor analysis framework that extends existing factor analysis models for educational data mining to efficiently output uncertainty estimation in the model's estimated factors. Such uncertainty information is useful, for example, for an adaptive testing scenario, where additional tests can be administered if the model is not quite certain about a students' skill level estimation. Traditional Bayesian inference methods that produce such uncertainty information are computationally expensive and do not scale to large data sets. VarFA utilizes variational inference which makes it possible to efficiently perform Bayesian inference even on very large data sets. We use the sparse factor analysis model as a case study and demonstrate the efficacy of VarFA on both synthetic and real data sets. VarFA is also very general and can be applied to a wide array of factor analysis models. 

Sensor-free affect detectors can detect student affect using their activities within intelligent tutoring systems or other online learning environments rather than using sensors. This technology has made affect detection more scalable and less invasive. However, existing detectors are either interpretable but less accurate (e.g., classical algorithms such as logistic regression) or more accurate but uninterpretable (e.g., neural networks). We investigate the use of a new type of neural networks that are monotonic after the first layer for affect detection that can strike a balance between accuracy and interpretability. Results on a real- world student affect dataset show that monotonic neural networks achieve comparable detection accuracy to their non-monotonic counterparts while offering some level of interpretability. 

When engaging with a textbook, students are inclined to highlight key content. Although students believe that highlighting and subsequent review of the highlights will further their educational goals, the psychological literature provides no evidence of benefits. Nonetheless, a student’s choice of text for highlighting may serve as a window into their mental state—their level of comprehension, grasp of the key ideas, reading goals, etc. We explore this hypothesis via an experiment in which 198 participants read sections from a college-level biology text, briefly reviewed the text, and then took a quiz on the material. During initial reading, participants were able to highlight words, phrases, and sentences, and these highlights were displayed along with the complete text during the subsequent review. Consistent with past research, the amount of highlighted material is unrelated to quiz performance. However, our main goal is to examine highlighting as a data source for inferring student understanding. We explored multiple representations of the highlighting patterns and tested Bayesian linear regression and neural network models, but we found little or no relationship between a student’s highlights and quiz performance. Our long-term goal is to design digital textbooks that serve not only as conduits of information into the mind of the reader, but also allow us to draw inferences about the reader at a point where interventions may increase the effectiveness of the material.