In student modeling, the concept of "mastery learning" i.e. that a student continues to learn a skill till mastery is attained is important. Usually, mastery is defined in terms of most recent student performance. This is also the case with models such as Knowledge Tracing which estimate knowledge solely based on patterns of questions a student gets correct and the task usually is to predict immediate next action of the student. In retrospect however, it is not clear if this is a good definition of mastery since it is perhaps more useful to focus more on student retention over a longer period of time. This paper improves a recently introduced model by Wang and Beck that predicts long term student performance by clustering the students and generating multiple predictions by using a recently developed ensemble technique. Another contribution is that we introduce a novel clustering algorithm we call "Regularity Clustering" and show that it is superior in the task of predicting student retention over more popular techniques such as k-means and Spectral Clustering.

An important aspect of Intelligent Tutoring Systems is providing assistance to students as well as assessing them. The standard state-of-the-art algorithms (Knowledge Tracing and Performance Factor Analysis) for tracking student knowledge, however, only look at the correctness of student first response and ignore the amount of assistance students needed to eventually answer the question correctly. In this paper, we propose the Assistance Model (AM) for predicting student performance using information about the number of hints and attempts a student needed to answer the previous question. We built ensemble models that combine the state-of-the-art algorithms and the Assistance Model together to see if the Assistance Model brings improvements. We used an ASSISTments dataset of 200 students answering a total of 4,142 questions generated from 207 question templates. Our results showed that the Assistance Model did in fact reliably increase predictive accuracy when combined with the state-of-the-art algorithms.