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Knowledge tracing (KT) is a crucial task in intelligent education, focusing on predicting students' performance on given questions to trace their evolving knowledge. The advancement of deep learning in this field has led to deep-learning knowledge tracing (DLKT) models that prioritize high predictive accuracy. However, many existing DLKT methods overlook the fundamental goal of tracking students' dynamical knowledge mastery. These models do not explicitly model knowledge mastery tracing processes or yield unreasonable results that educators find difficulty to comprehend and apply in real teaching scenarios. In response, our research conducts a preliminary analysis of mainstream KT approaches to highlight and explain such unreasonableness. We introduce GRKT, a graph-based reasonable knowledge tracing method to address these issues. By leveraging graph neural networks, our approach delves into the mutual influences of knowledge concepts, offering a more accurate representation of how the knowledge mastery evolves throughout the learning process. Additionally, we propose a fine-grained and psychological three-stage modeling process as knowledge retrieval, memory strengthening, and knowledge learning/forgetting, to conduct a more reasonable knowledge tracing process. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that GRKT outperforms eleven baselines across three datasets, not only enhancing predictive accuracy but also generating more reasonable knowledge tracing results. This makes our model a promising advancement for practical implementation in educational settings. The source code is available at https://github.com/JJCui96/GRKT., Comment: Preprint, accepted to appear in SIGKDD 2024, 12 pages. The source code is available at https://github.com/JJCui96/GRKT. Keywords: interpretable knowledge tracing, student behavior modeling, intelligence education

With the development of artificial intelligence, personalized learning has attracted much attention as an integral part of intelligent education. China, the United States, the European Union, and others have put forward the importance of personalized learning in recent years, emphasizing the realization of the organic combination of large-scale education and personalized training. The development of a personalized learning system oriented to learners' preferences and suited to learners' needs should be accelerated. This review provides a comprehensive analysis of the current situation of personalized learning and its key role in education. It discusses the research on personalized learning from multiple perspectives, combining definitions, goals, and related educational theories to provide an in-depth understanding of personalized learning from an educational perspective, analyzing the implications of different theories on personalized learning, and highlighting the potential of personalized learning to meet the needs of individuals and to enhance their abilities. Data applications and assessment indicators in personalized learning are described in detail, providing a solid data foundation and evaluation system for subsequent research. Meanwhile, we start from both student modeling and recommendation algorithms and deeply analyze the cognitive and non-cognitive perspectives and the contribution of personalized recommendations to personalized learning. Finally, we explore the challenges and future trajectories of personalized learning. This review provides a multidimensional analysis of personalized learning through a more comprehensive study, providing academics and practitioners with cutting-edge explorations to promote continuous progress in the field of personalized learning., Comment: 82 pages,5 figures

Knowledge tracing (KT) plays a crucial role in computer-aided education and intelligent tutoring systems, aiming to assess students' knowledge proficiency by predicting their future performance on new questions based on their past response records. While existing deep learning knowledge tracing (DLKT) methods have significantly improved prediction accuracy and achieved state-of-the-art results, they often suffer from a lack of interpretability. To address this limitation, current approaches have explored incorporating psychological influences to achieve more explainable predictions, but they tend to overlook the potential influences of historical responses. In fact, understanding how models make predictions based on response influences can enhance the transparency and trustworthiness of the knowledge tracing process, presenting an opportunity for a new paradigm of interpretable KT. However, measuring unobservable response influences is challenging. In this paper, we resort to counterfactual reasoning that intervenes in each response to answer \textit{what if a student had answered a question incorrectly that he/she actually answered correctly, and vice versa}. Based on this, we propose RCKT, a novel response influence-based counterfactual knowledge tracing framework. RCKT generates response influences by comparing prediction outcomes from factual sequences and constructed counterfactual sequences after interventions. Additionally, we introduce maximization and inference techniques to leverage accumulated influences from different past responses, further improving the model's performance and credibility. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our RCKT method outperforms state-of-the-art knowledge tracing methods on four datasets against six baselines, and provides credible interpretations of response influences., Comment: ICDE'24 (fixing a few typos). Source code at https://github.com/JJCui96/RCKT. Keywords: knowledge tracing, interpretable machine learning, counterfactual reasoning, artificial intelligence for education

In computer-aided education and intelligent tutoring systems, knowledge tracing (KT) raises attention due to the development of data-driven learning methods, which aims to predict students' future performance given their past question response sequences to trace their knowledge states. However, current deep learning approaches only focus on enhancing prediction accuracy, but neglecting the discrimination imbalance of responses. That is, a considerable proportion of question responses are weak to discriminate students' knowledge states, but equally considered compared to other discriminative responses, thus hurting the ability of tracing students' personalized knowledge states. To tackle this issue, we propose DR4KT for Knowledge Tracing, which reweights the contribution of different responses according to their discrimination in training. For retaining high prediction accuracy on low discriminative responses after reweighting, DR4KT also introduces a discrimination-aware score fusion technique to make a proper combination between student knowledge mastery and the questions themselves. Comprehensive experimental results show that our DR4KT applied on four mainstream KT methods significantly improves their performance on three widely-used datasets.