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Students acquire knowledge as they interact with a variety of learning materials, such as video lectures, problems, and discussions. Modeling student knowledge at each point during their learning period and understanding the contribution of each learning material to student knowledge are essential for detecting students’ knowledge gaps and recommending learning materials to them. Current student knowledge modeling techniques mostly rely on one type of learning material, mainly problems, to model student knowledge growth. These approaches ignore the fact that students also learn from other types of material. In this paper, we propose a student knowledge model that can capture knowledge growth as a result of learning from a diverse set of learning resource types while unveiling the association between the learning materials of different types. Our multi-view knowledge model (MVKM) incorporates a flexible knowledge increase objective on top of a multi-view tensor factorization to capture occasional forgetting while representing student knowledge and learning material concepts in a lower-dimensional latent space. We evaluate our model in different experiments to show that it can accurately predict students’ future performance, differentiate between knowledge gain in different student groups and concepts, and unveil hidden similarities across learning materials of different types. 

Recent studies have shown that students follow stable behavioral patterns while learning in online educational systems. These behavioral patterns can further be used to group the students into different clusters. However, as these clusters include both high- and low-performance students, the relation between the behavioral patterns and student performance is yet to be clarified. In this work, we study the relationship between students’ learning behaviors and their performance, in a self-organized online learning system that allows them to freely practice with various problems and worked examples. We represent each student’s behavior as a vector of highsupport sequential micro-patterns. Then, we discover both the prevalent behavioral patterns in each group and the shared patterns across groups using discriminative non-negative matrix factorization. Our experiments show that we can successfully detect such common and specific patterns in students’ behavior that can be further interpreted into student learning behavior trait patterns and performance patterns. 

Recent studies of student problem-solving behavior have shown stable behavior patterns within student groups. In this work, we study patterns of student behavior in a richer self-organized practice context where student worked with a combination of problems to solve and worked examples to study. We model student behavior in the form of vectors of micro-patterns and examine student behavior stability in various ways via these vectors. To discover and examine global behavior patterns associated with groups of students, we cluster students according to their behavior patterns and evaluate these clusters in accordance with student performance. 

Cross-domain collaborative filtering recommenders exploit data from other domains (e.g., movie ratings) to predict users’ interests in a different target domain (e.g., suggest music). Most current cross-domain recommenders focus on modeling user ratings but pay limited attention to user reviews. Additionally, due to the complexity of these recommender systems, they cannot provide any information to users to support user decisions. To address these challenges, we propose Deep Hybrid Cross Domain (DHCD) model, a cross-domain neural framework, that can simultaneously predict user ratings, and provide useful information to strengthen the suggestions and support user decision across multiple domains. Specifically, DHCD enhances the predicted ratings by jointly modeling two crucial facets of users’ product assessment: ratings and reviews. To support decisions, it models and provides natural review-like sentences across domains according to user interests and item features. This model is robust in integrating user rating and review information from more than two domains. Our extensive experiments show that DHCD can significantly outperform advanced baselines in rating predictions and review generation tasks. For rating prediction tasks, it outperforms cross-domain and single-domain collaborative filtering as well as hybrid recommender systems. Furthermore, our review generation experiments suggest an improved perplexity score and transfer of review information in DHCD. 

One of the essential problems, in educational data mining, is to predict students' performance on future learning materials, such as problems, assignments, and quizzes. Pioneer algorithms for predicting student performance mostly rely on two sources of information: students' past performance, and learning materials' domain knowledge model. The domain knowledge model, traditionally curated by domain experts maps learning materials to concepts, topics, or knowledge components that are presented in them. However, creating a domain model by manually labeling the learning material can be a difficult and time-consuming task. In this paper, we propose a tensor factorization model for student performance prediction that does not rely on a predefined domain model. Our proposed algorithm models student knowledge as a soft membership of latent concepts. It also represents the knowledge acquisition process with an added rank-based constraint in the tensor factorization objective function. Our experiments show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms in predicting student performance in two real-world datasets, and is robust to hyper-parameters.