In Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS), tracing the student's knowledge state during learning has been studied for several decades in order to provide more supportive learning instructions. In this paper, we propose a novel model for knowledge tracing that i) captures students' learning ability and dynamically assigns students into distinct groups with similar ability at regular time intervals, and ii) combines this information with a Recurrent Neural Network architecture known as Deep Knowledge Tracing. Experimental results confirm that the proposed model is significantly better at predicting student performance than well known state-of-the-art techniques for student modelling.
We review here four of the best known state-of-the-art student modelling methods for estimating student's performance, either for their predominance in psychometrics (IRT) or Educational Data Mining (BKT), or because they are best performers (PFA, DKT). See @cite_18 for a general review.
@cite_18
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Estimating student proficiency is an important task for computer based learning systems. We compare a family of IRT-based proficiency estimation methods to Deep Knowledge Tracing (DKT), a recently proposed recurrent neural network model with promising initial results. We evaluate how well each model predicts a student's future response given previous responses using two publicly available and one proprietary data set. We find that IRT-based methods consistently matched or outperformed DKT across all data sets at the finest level of content granularity that was tractable for them to be trained on. A hierarchical extension of IRT that captured item grouping structure performed best overall. When data sets included non-trivial autocorrelations in student response patterns, a temporal extension of IRT improved performance over standard IRT while the RNN-based method did not. We conclude that IRT-based models provide a simpler, better-performing alternative to existing RNN-based models of student interaction data while also affording more interpretability and guarantees due to their formulation as Bayesian probabilistic models.