Knowledge tracing aims to model and predict students' knowledge states during learning activities. Traditional methods like Bayesian Knowledge Tracing (BKT) and logistic regression have limitations in granularity and performance, while deep knowledge tracing (DKT) models often suffer from lacking transparency. This paper proposes a…

The prediction of student performance and the analysis of students' learning behaviour play an important role in enhancing online courses. By analysing a massive amount of clickstream data that captures student behaviour, educators can gain valuable insights into the factors that influence students' academic outcomes and identify areas of…

Understanding students' learning of knowledge components (KCs) is an important educational data mining task and enables many educational applications. However, in the domain of computing education, where program exercises require students to practice many KCs simultaneously, it is a challenge to attribute their errors to specific KCs and,…

Randomized A/B tests within online learning platforms represent an exciting direction in learning sciences. With minimal assumptions, they allow causal effect estimation without confounding bias and exact statistical inference even in small samples. However, often experimental samples and/or treatment effects are small, A/B tests are underpowered,…

Analysis of programming process data has become popular in computing education research and educational data mining in the last decade. This type of data is quantitative, often of high temporal resolution, and it can be collected non-intrusively while the student is in a natural setting. Many levels of granularity can be obtained, such as…

Various areas of educational research are interested in the transitions between different states--or events--in sequential data, with the goal of understanding the significance of these transitions; one notable example is affect dynamics, which aims to identify important transitions between affective states. Unfortunately, several works have…

Teachers often use open-ended questions to promote students' deeper understanding of the content. These questions are particularly useful in K-12 mathematics education, as they provide richer insights into students' problem-solving processes compared to closed-ended questions. However, they are also challenging to implement in educational…

Educational data mining has allowed for large improvements in educational outcomes and understanding of educational processes. However, there remains a constant tension between educational data mining advances and protecting student privacy while using educational datasets. Publicly available datasets have facilitated numerous research projects…

In higher education, academic advising is crucial to students' decision-making. Data-driven models can benefit students in making informed decisions by providing insightful recommendations for completing their degrees. To suggest courses for the upcoming semester, various course recommendation models have been proposed in the literature using…

A model that maps the requisite skills, or knowledge components, to the contents of an online course is necessary to implement many adaptive learning technologies. However, developing a skill model and tagging courseware contents with individual skills can be expensive and error prone. We propose a technology to automatically identify latent…

In this paper, we present an extended evaluation of a course recommender system designed to support students who struggle in the first semesters of their studies and are at risk of dropping out. The system, which was developed in earlier work using a student-centered design, is based on the explainable k-nearest neighbor algorithm and recommends a…

We introduce a model which combines principles from psychometric and connectionist paradigms to allow direct Q-matrix refinement via backpropagation. We call this model dAFM, based on augmentation of the original Additive Factors Model (AFM), whose calculations and constraints we show can be exactly replicated within the framework of neural…

Affect dynamics, the investigation of how student affect transitions from one state to another, is a popular area of research in adaptive learning environments. Recently, the commonly used transition metric "L" has come under critical examination when applied to data that exclude self-transitions (i.e., transitions where a student…

To successfully reduce student attrition, it is imperative to understand what the underlying determinants of attrition are and which students are at risk of dropping out. We develop an early detection system (EDS) using administrative student data from a state and private university to predict student dropout as a basis for a targeted…

This study investigates the effects of a scenario-based assessment design on students' writing processes. An experimental data set consisting of four design conditions was used in which the number of scenarios (one or two) and the placement of the essay task with respect to the lead-in tasks (first vs. last) were varied. Students' writing…