Deep Knowledge Tracing and Dynamic Student Classification for Knowledge Tracing

Abstract--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. ITS is an active field of research that aims to provide personalized instructions to students. A wide array of Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Representation techniques have been explored, of which we can mention rule-based and Bayesian representation of student knowledge and misconceptions, skills modeling with logistic regression in Item Response Theory, case-based reasoning, and, more recently reinforcement learning and deep learning [1], [2]. One can even argue that most of the main techniques found in Artificial Intelligence and Data Mining have found their way into the field of ITS, and in particular for the problem of knowledge tracing, which aims to model the student's state of mastery of conceptual or procedural knowledge from observed performance on tasks [3].