Improving AI's ability to identify students who need help

Multi-task learning is an approach in which one model is asked to perform multiple tasks. "In our case, we wanted the model to be able to predict whether a student would answer each question on a test correctly, based on the student's behavior while playing an educational game called Crystal Island," says Jonathan Rowe, co-author of a paper on the work and a research scientist in North Carolina State University's Center for Educational Informatics (CEI). "The standard approach for solving this problem looks only at overall test score, viewing the test as one task," Rowe says. "In the context of our multi-task learning framework, the model has 17 tasks -- because the test has 17 questions." The researchers had gameplay and testing data from 181 students.