ContextKT: A Context-Based Method for Knowledge Tracing

Abstract

Knowledge tracing, which is used to predict students’ performance based on their previous practices, has attracted many researchers’ attention. Especially in this rising period of intelligent education, many knowledge tracing methods have been developed. However, most of the existing knowledge tracing methods focus on the personality of practices and knowledge concepts but ignore the contexts related to the studying process. In this paper, we propose a context-based knowledge tracing model, which combines students’ historical performance and their studying contexts during knowledge mastery. To be specific, we first define five studying contexts for performance prediction. The basic context is the current knowledge state of a student, which is described by their practice sequences. Then, a QR-matrix is defined to represent the relationship among questions, knowledge concepts, and responses, which describes the contexts of questions and knowledge. Furthermore, an improved LSTM model is proposed to capture the context of students’ memory and forgetness, and a multi-head attention mechanism is designed to capture the context of students’ behaviors. Finally, based on the captured contexts, the prediction model ContextKT is established. Our prediction model is evaluated on two real educational datasets. The experimental results show our model is effective and efficient in student performance prediction, and it outperforms the other existing methods.