KT-Bi-GRU: Student Performance Prediction with a Recurrent Knowledge Tracing Neural Network

Abstract

<p>The work in this paper is an extended research of our previous work: M. Delianidi, K. Diamantaras, G. Chrysogonidis, and V. Nikiforidis,“Student performance prediction using dynamic neural models,” in Fourteenth International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2021), 2021, pp. 46–54. In both works we study the task of predicting a student's performance in a series of questions based, at each step, on the answers he/she has given on the previous questions. We propose a recurrent neural network approach where the dynamic part of the model is a Bidirectional GRU layer. In this work, we differentiate the model architecture from the earlier paper by imposing that the dynamic part is based exclusively on the history of previous question/answers, not including the current question. Then, the subsequent classification part is fed by the output of the dynamic part and the current question. In this way, the first part estimates the student's knowledge state and represents it with a dynamically generated vector considering only the student's previous questions and responses. We call this part the “Knowledge State Representation subnet''. Using this representation, the following “Tracing subnet'' which is a static multi-layer classifier can predict the correctness of the answer to any following question. Therefore, this architecture is suitable not only for described prediction task but also for recommendation tasks which were not possible with the previous architecture. In addition, in this work, we also study the effectiveness of our models against each other, as well as against the previous state-of-the-art models on seven datasets including a new multi-skills dataset derived from the NeurIPS 2020 education challenge. Both our models compare favorably against the state-of-the-art methods in almost all datasets, while the newly proposed architecture achieves very similar results compared to our earlier model in most cases except for two cases, including the multi-skill “NeurIPS-2020-small'' dataset, where it achieves considerably better results.</p>