Prerequisite-Driven Deep Knowledge Tracing

Knowledge tracing serves as the key technique in the computer supported education environment (e.g., intelligent tutoring systems) to model student's knowledge states. While the Bayesian knowledge tracing and deep knowledge tracing models have been developed, the sparseness of student's exercise data still limits knowledge tracing's performance and applications. In order to address this issue, we advocate for and propose to incorporate the knowledge structure information, especially the prerequisite relations between pedagogical concepts, into the knowledge tracing model. Specifically, by considering how students master pedagogical concepts and their prerequisites, we model prerequisite concept pairs as ordering pairs. With a proper mathematical formulation, this property can be utilized as constraints in designing knowledge tracing model. As a result, the obtained model can have a better performance on student concept mastery prediction. In order to evaluate this model, we test it on five different real world datasets, and the experimental results show that the proposed model achieves a significant performance improvement by comparing with three knowledge tracing models.