Does Self-Discipline Impact Students' Knowledge and Learning?

In this study, we are interested to see the impact of self-discipline on students' knowledge and learning. Self-discipline can influence both learning rate as well as knowledge accumulation over time. We used a Knowledge Tracing (KT) model to make inferences about students' knowledge and learning. Based on a widely used questionnaire, we measured students' level of self-discipline. When we analyzed the relation of students' self-discipline with their knowledge attributes, we found that high self-discipline students had significantly higher initial knowledge, but there is no consistent relationship of learning while using the tutor. Moreover, higher self-discipline students seemed more careful with respect to making careless mistakes. (Contains 5 figures and 5 tables.) [Additional funding was provided by the Fulbright Program. For the complete proceedings, "Proceedings of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM) (2nd, Cordoba, Spain, July 1-3, 2009)," see ED539041.]