Educational recommendation lies in constructing a recommend system that can process the interactions between students and questions.

The focus of our work is on diagnostic tasks in personalized learning, such as cognitive diagnosis and knowledge tracing. The goal of these tasks is to assess students'

Educational recommendation lies in constructing a recommend system that can process the interactions between students and questions.

The focus of our work is on diagnostic tasks in personalized learning, such as cognitive diagnosis and knowledge tracing. The goal of these tasks is to assess students'

Student performance prediction is one of the most important subjects in educational data mining. As a modern technology, machine learning offers powerful capabilities in feature extraction and data modeling, providing essential support for diverse application scenarios, as evidenced by recent studies confirming its effectiveness in educational data mining. However, despite extensive prediction experiments, machine learning methods have not been effectively integrated into practical teaching strategies, hindering their application in modern education. In addition, massive features as input variables for machine learning algorithms often leads to information redundancy, which can negatively impact prediction accuracy. Therefore, how to effectively use machine learning methods to predict student performance and integrate the prediction results with actual teaching scenarios is a worthy research subject. To this end, this study integrates the results of machine learning-based student performance prediction with tiered instruction, aiming to enhance student outcomes in target course, which is significant for the application of educational data mining in contemporary teaching scenarios. Specifically, we collect original educational data and perform feature selection to reduce information redundancy. Then, the performance of five representative machine learning methods is analyzed and discussed with Random Forest showing the best performance. Furthermore, based on the results of the classification of students, tiered instruction is applied accordingly, and different teaching objectives and contents are set for all levels of students. The comparison of teaching outcomes between the control and experimental classes, along with the analysis of questionnaire results, demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Grade prediction for future courses not yet taken by students is important as it can help them and their advisers during the process of course selection as well as for designing personalized degree plans and modifying them based on their performance. One of the successful approaches for accurately predicting a student's grades in future courses is Cumulative Knowledge-based Regression Models (CKRM). CKRM learns shallow linear models that predict a student's grades as the similarity between his/her knowledge state and the target course. However, prior courses taken by a student can have \black{different contributions when estimating a student's knowledge state and towards each target course, which} cannot be captured by linear models. Moreover, CKRM and other grade prediction methods ignore the effect of concurrently-taken courses on a student's performance in a target course. In this paper, we propose context-aware non-linear and neural attentive models that can potentially better estimate a student's knowledge state from his/her prior course information, as well as model the interactions between a target course and concurrent courses. Compared to the competing methods, our experiments on a large real-world dataset consisting of more than $1.5$M grades show the effectiveness of the proposed models in accurately predicting students' grades. Moreover, the attention weights learned by the neural attentive model can be helpful in better designing their degree plans.

Student's academic performance prediction empowers educational technologies including academic trajectory and degree planning, course recommender systems, early warning and advising systems. Given a student's past data (such as grades in prior courses), the task of student's performance prediction is to predict a student's grades in future courses. Academic programs are structured in a way that prior courses lay the foundation for future courses. The knowledge required by courses is obtained by taking multiple prior courses, which exhibits complex relationships modeled by graph structures. Traditional methods for student's performance prediction usually neglect the underlying relationships between multiple courses; and how students acquire knowledge across them. In addition, traditional methods do not provide interpretation for predictions needed for decision making. In this work, we propose a novel attention-based graph convolutional networks model for student's performance prediction. We conduct extensive experiments on a real-world dataset obtained from a large public university. The experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of grade prediction. The proposed model also shows strong accuracy in identifying students who are at-risk of failing or dropping out so that timely intervention and feedback can be provided to the student.

The increasingly fast development cycle for online course contents, along with the diverse student demographics in each online classroom, make real-time student outcomes prediction an interesting topic for both industrial research and practical needs. In this paper, we tackle the problem of real-time student performance prediction in an on-going course using a domain adaptation framework. This framework is a system trained on labeled student outcome data from previous coursework but is meant to be deployed on another course. In particular, we introduce a GritNet architecture, and develop an unsupervised domain adaptation method to transfer a GritNet trained on a past course to a new course without any student outcome label. Our results for real Udacity student graduation predictions show that the GritNet not only generalizes well from one course to another across different Nanodegree programs, but also enhances real-time predictions explicitly in the first few weeks when accurate predictions are most challenging.

Grade prediction for future courses not yet taken by students is important as it can help them and their advisers during the process of course selection as well as for designing personalized degree plans and modifying them based on their performance. One of the successful approaches for accurately predicting a student's grades in future courses is Cumulative Knowledge-based Regression Models (CKRM). CKRM learns shallow linear models that predict a student's grades as the similarity between his/her knowledge state and the target course. A student's knowledge state is built by linearly accumulating the learned provided knowledge components of the courses he/she has taken in the past, weighted by his/her grades in them. However, not all the prior courses contribute equally to the target course. In this paper, we propose a novel Neural Attentive Knowledge-based model (NAK) that learns the importance of each historical course in predicting the grade of a target course. Compared to CKRM and other competing approaches, our experiments on a large real-world dataset consisting of $\sim$1.5 grades show the effectiveness of the proposed NAK model in accurately predicting the students' grades. Moreover, the attention weights learned by the model can be helpful in better designing their degree plans.

Currently, college-going students are taking longer to graduate than their parental generations. Further, in the United States, the six-year graduation rate has been 59% for decades. Improving the educational quality by training better-prepared students who can successfully graduate in a timely manner is critical. Accurately predicting students' grades in future courses has attracted much attention as it can help identify at-risk students early so that personalized feedback can be provided to them on time by advisors. Prior research on students' grade prediction include shallow linear models; however, students' learning is a highly complex process that involves the accumulation of knowledge across a sequence of courses that can not be sufficiently modeled by these linear models. In addition to that, prior approaches focus on prediction accuracy without considering prediction uncertainty, which is essential for advising and decision making. In this work, we present two types of Bayesian deep learning models for grade prediction. The MLP ignores the temporal dynamics of students' knowledge evolution. Hence, we propose RNN for students' performance prediction. To evaluate the performance of the proposed models, we performed extensive experiments on data collected from a large public university. The experimental results show that the proposed models achieve better performance than prior state-of-the-art approaches. Besides more accurate results, Bayesian deep learning models estimate uncertainty associated with the predictions. We explore how uncertainty estimation can be applied towards developing a reliable educational early warning system. In addition to uncertainty, we also develop an approach to explain the prediction results, which is useful for advisors to provide personalized feedback to students.