NotesFAQContact Us
Collection
Advanced
Search Tips
Back to results
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
PDF on ERIC Download full text
ERIC Number: ED675632
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2025
Pages: 13
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: 0000-00-00
KCluster: An LLM-Based Clustering Approach to Knowledge Component Discovery
Yumou Wei; Paulo Carvalho; John Stamper
International Educational Data Mining Society, Paper presented at the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM) (18th, Palermo, Italy, Jul 20-23, 2025)
Educators evaluate student knowledge using knowledge component (KC) models that map assessment questions to KCs. Still, designing KC models for large question banks remains an insurmountable challenge for instructors who need to analyze each question by hand. The growing use of Generative AI in education is expected only to aggravate this chronic deficiency of expert-designed KC models, as course engineers designing KCs struggle to keep up with the pace at which questions are generated. In this work, we propose KCluster, a novel KC discovery algorithm based on identifying clusters of congruent questions according to a new similarity metric induced by a large language model (LLM). We demonstrate in three datasets that an LLM can create an effective metric of question similarity, which a clustering algorithm can use to create KC models from questions with minimal human effort. Combining the strengths of LLM and clustering, KCluster generates descriptive KC labels and discovers KC models that predict student performance better than the best expert-designed models available. In anticipation of future work, we illustrate how KCluster can reveal insights into difficult KCs and suggest improvements to instruction. [For the complete proceedings, see ED675583.]
International Educational Data Mining Society. e-mail: admin@educationaldatamining.org; Web site: https://educationaldatamining.org/conferences/
Publication Type: Speeches/Meeting Papers; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: 2301130; N6833523C0035
Author Affiliations: N/A