In educational systems, predictive models face significant challenges during initial deployment and when new students begin to use them or when new exercises are added to the system due to a lack of data for making initial inferences, often called the cold start problem. This paper tests logitdec and logitdecevol, "evolutionary" features…

Teacher classroom teaching behavior indicators serve as a crucial foundation for guiding instructional evaluation. Existing indicator system suffers from limitations such as strong subjectivity and weak contextual generalization capabilities. Generalized category discovery (GCD) enables automatic data clustering to identify known categories and…

Missing data presents a significant challenge in Educational Data Mining (EDM). Imputation techniques aim to reconstruct missing data while preserving critical information in datasets for more accurate analysis. Although imputation techniques have gained attention in various fields in recent years, their use for addressing missing data in…

The traditional Elo rating system (ERS), widely used as a student model in adaptive learning systems, assumes unidimensionality (i.e., all items measure a single ability or skill), limiting its ability to handle multidimensional data common in educational contexts. In response, several multidimensional extensions of the Elo rating system have been…

Predictive models of student success can provide timely information to inform interventions in K-12 and higher education. However, the design and implementation of these predictive models require various stakeholders to make decisions about the prediction target, data sources, processing, training, models, and deployment strategies. These choices…

Algorithmic bias is a pressing concern in educational data mining (EDM), as it risks amplifying inequities in learning outcomes. The Area Between ROC Curves (ABROCA) metric is frequently used to measure discrepancies in model performance across demographic groups to quantify overall model fairness. However, its skewed distribution--especially when…

In an educational setting, an estimate of the difficulty of Multiple-Choice Questions (MCQs), a commonly used strategy to assess learning progress, constitutes very useful information for both teachers and students. Since human assessment is costly from multiple points of view, automatic approaches to MCQ item difficulty estimation are…

Knowledge tracing (KT) models predict how students will perform on future interactions, given a sequence of prior responses. Modern approaches to KT leverage "deep learning" techniques to produce more accurate predictions, potentially making personalized learning paths more efficacious for learners. Many papers on the topic of KT focus…

The increasing use of complex machine learning models in education has led to concerns about their interpretability, which in turn has spurred interest in developing explainability techniques that are both faithful to the model's inner workings and intelligible to human end-users. In this paper, we describe a novel approach to creating a…

Knowledge tracing (KT) models have been a commonly used tool for tracking students' knowledge status. Recent advances in deep knowledge tracing (DKT) have demonstrated increased performance for knowledge tracing tasks in many datasets. However, interpreting students' states on single knowledge components (KCs) from DKT models could be challenging…

In category learning, a growing body of literature has increasingly focused on exploring the impacts of interleaving in contrast to blocking. The sequential attention hypothesis posits that interleaving draws attention to the differences between categories while blocking directs attention toward similarities within categories [4, 5]. Although a…

There is a growing need to empirically evaluate the quality of online instructional interventions at scale. In response, some online learning platforms have begun to implement rapid A/B testing of instructional interventions. In these scenarios, students participate in series of randomized experiments that evaluate problem-level interventions in…

Recent advances in the development of large language models (LLMs) have led to power innovative suites of generative AI tools that are capable of not only simulating human-like-dialogue but also composing more complex artifacts, such as social media posts, essays, and even research articles. While this abstract has been written entirely by a human…

Dynamic Item Response Models extend the standard Item Response Theory (IRT) to capture temporal dynamics in learner ability. While these models have the potential to allow instructional systems to actively monitor the evolution of learner proficiency in real time, existing dynamic item response models rely on expensive inference algorithms that…

We investigated methods to enhance the generalizability of large language models (LLMs) designed to classify dimensions of collaborative discourse during small group work. Our research utilized five diverse datasets that spanned various grade levels, demographic groups, collaboration settings, and curriculum units. We explored different model…