Knowledge tracing (KT) is the task of using students' historical learning interaction data to model their knowledge mastery over time so as to make predictions on their future interaction performance. Recently, remarkable progress has been made of using various deep learning techniques to solve the KT problem. However, the success behind deep learning based knowledge tracing (DLKT) approaches is still left somewhat unknown and proper measurement and analysis of these DLKT approaches remain a challenge. First, data preprocessing procedures in existing works are often private and custom, which limits experimental standardization. Furthermore, existing DLKT studies often differ in terms of the evaluation protocol and are far away real-world educational contexts. To address these problems, we introduce a comprehensive python based benchmark platform, \textsc{pyKT}, to guarantee valid comparisons across DLKT methods via thorough evaluations. The \textsc{pyKT} library consists of a standardized set of integrated data preprocessing procedures on 7 popular datasets across different domains, and 10 frequently compared DLKT model implementations for transparent experiments. Results from our fine-grained and rigorous empirical KT studies yield a set of observations and suggestions for effective DLKT, e.g., wrong evaluation setting may cause label leakage that generally leads to performance inflation; and the improvement of many DLKT approaches is minimal compared to the very first DLKT model proposed by Piech et al. \cite{piech2015deep}. We have open sourced \textsc{pyKT} and our experimental results at \url{https://pykt.org/}.

Knowledge Tracing (KT) has been an established problem in the educational data mining field for decades, and it is commonly assumed that the underlying learning process being modeled remains static. Given the ever-changing landscape of online learning platforms (OLPs), we investigate how concept drift and changing student populations can impact student behavior within an OLP through testing model performance both within a single academic year and across multiple academic years. Four well-studied KT models were applied to five academic years of data to assess how susceptible KT models are to concept drift. Through our analysis, we find that all four families of KT models can exhibit degraded performance, Bayesian Knowledge Tracing (BKT) remains the most stable KT model when applied to newer data, while more complex, attention based models lose predictive power significantly faster.

Knowledge tracing (KT) is the task of using students' historical learning interaction data to model their knowledge mastery over time so as to make predictions on their future interaction performance. Recently, remarkable progress has been made of using various deep learning techniques to solve the KT problem. However, the success behind deep learning based knowledge tracing (DLKT) approaches is still left somewhat unknown and proper measurement and analysis of these DLKT approaches remain a challenge. First, data preprocessing procedures in existing works are often private and custom, which limits experimental standardization. Furthermore, existing DLKT studies often differ in terms of the evaluation protocol and are far away real-world educational contexts. To address these problems, we introduce a comprehensive python based benchmark platform, \textsc{pyKT}, to guarantee valid comparisons across DLKT methods via thorough evaluations.

Knowledge tracing (KT) is the problem of predicting students' future performance based on their historical interaction sequences. With the advanced capability of capturing contextual long-term dependency, attention mechanism becomes one of the essential components in many deep learning based KT (DLKT) models. In spite of the impressive performance achieved by these attentional DLKT models, many of them are often vulnerable to run the risk of overfitting, especially on small-scale educational datasets. Therefore, in this paper, we propose \textsc{sparseKT}, a simple yet effective framework to improve the robustness and generalization of the attention based DLKT approaches. Specifically, we incorporate a k-selection module to only pick items with the highest attention scores. We propose two sparsification heuristics : (1) soft-thresholding sparse attention and (2) top-$K$ sparse attention. We show that our \textsc{sparseKT} is able to help attentional KT models get rid of irrelevant student interactions and have comparable predictive performance when compared to 11 state-of-the-art KT models on three publicly available real-world educational datasets. To encourage reproducible research, we make our data and code publicly available at \url{https://github.com/pykt-team/pykt-toolkit}\footnote{We merged our model to the \textsc{pyKT} benchmark at \url{https://pykt.org/}.}.

In category learning, a growing body of literature has increasingly focused on exploring the impacts of interleaving in contrast to blocking. The sequential attention hypothesis posits that interleaving draws attention to the differences between categories while blocking directs attention toward similarities within categories. Although a recent study underscores the joint influence of memory and attentional factors on sequencing effects, there remains a scarcity of effective computational models integrating both attentional and memory considerations to comprehensively understand the effect of training sequences on students' performance. This study introduces a novel integration of attentional factors and spacing into the logistic knowledge tracing (LKT) models to monitor students' performance across different training sequences (interleaving and blocking). Attentional factors were incorporated by recording the counts of comparisons between adjacent trials, considering whether they belong to the same or different category. Several features were employed to account for temporal spacing. We used cross-validations to test the model fit and predictions on the learning session and posttest. Our findings reveal that incorporating both attentional factors and spacing features in the Additive Factors Model (AFM) significantly enhances its capacity to capture the effects of interleaving and blocking and demonstrates superior predictive accuracy for students' learning outcomes. By bridging the gap between attentional factors and memory processes, our computational approach offers a more comprehensive framework for understanding and predicting category learning outcomes in educational settings.