LTKT: Knowledge Tracing Based on Positive and Negative Learning Transfers

Abstract

Knowledge Tracing (KT) is a critical but challenging problem for many educational applications. As an essential part of educational psychology, the propagated influence among pedagogical concepts (i.e., learning transfer) is important for optimizing KT tasks. However, existing KT methods only consider the positive learning transfer and neglect the negative learning transfer. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel deep knowledge tracing model, called positive and negative Learning Transfers based Knowledge Tracing (LTKT). To the best of our knowledge, LTKT makes the first attempt to concurrently utilize the positive and negative learning transfer relations among concepts to improve KT results. First, LTKT employs a statistical-based approach to construct a learning transfer graph (LTG). Then, LTKT quantifies the impact of an exercise's practice result on the knowledge state of the concept via a direct learning effect component, after which a learning transfer effect component is carefully designed to quantify the impact of the practice result on the knowledge states of neighboring concepts based on the positive and negative learning transfer relations modeled by LTG. We conduct extensive experiments on public real-world datasets, and the experimental results show that LTKT outperforms all state-of-the-art KT methods and has good interpretability.

Keywords: Knowledge Tracing, Positive Learning Transfer, Negative Learning Transfer, Learning Transfer Graph, Deep Neural Network