+ Doing More with Less : Student Modeling and Performance Prediction with Reduced Content Models Yun...

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+ Doing More with Less : Student Modeling and Performance Prediction with Reduced Content Models Yun Huang, University of Pittsburgh Yanbo Xu, Carnegie Mellon University Peter Brusilovsky, University of Pittsburgh

Transcript of + Doing More with Less : Student Modeling and Performance Prediction with Reduced Content Models Yun...

Page 1: + Doing More with Less : Student Modeling and Performance Prediction with Reduced Content Models Yun Huang, University of Pittsburgh Yanbo Xu, Carnegie.

+Doing More with Less : Student Modeling and Performance Prediction with Reduced Content Models

Yun Huang, University of PittsburghYanbo Xu, Carnegie Mellon UniversityPeter Brusilovsky, University of Pittsburgh

Page 2: + Doing More with Less : Student Modeling and Performance Prediction with Reduced Content Models Yun Huang, University of Pittsburgh Yanbo Xu, Carnegie.

+This talk… What? More effective student

modeling and performance prediction

How? A novel framework reducing content model without loss of quality

Why? Better and cheaper Reduced to 10%~20% while maintaining

or improving performance (up to 8% better AUC)

Beat expert based reduction

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+Outline

Motivation

Content Model Reduction

Experiments and Results

Conclusion and Future Work

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+ Motivation

In some domains and some types of learning content, each content problem (item) is

related to large number of domain concepts (Knowledge Component, KCs)

It complicates modeling due to increasing noise and decreasing efficiency

We argue that we only need a subset of the most important KCs!

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+Content model

The focus of this study: Java Each problem involves a complete program

and relates to many concepts

Original content model Each problem is indexed by a set of Java

concepts from ontology In our context of study, number of concepts

per problem can range from 9 to 55!

Page 6: + Doing More with Less : Student Modeling and Performance Prediction with Reduced Content Models Yun Huang, University of Pittsburgh Yanbo Xu, Carnegie.

+An example of original content model

1. class definition2. static method3. public class4. public method5. void method6. String array7. int type variable

declaration 8. int type variable

initialization9. for statement10. assignment11. increment12. multiplication13. less or equal14. nested loop

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+Challenges

Select best concepts to model problems

Traditional feature selection focuses on selecting a subset of features for all datapoints (a domain).

item level not domain level

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+Our intuitions of reduction methods Three types of methods from different information

sources and intuitions:Intuition 1 “for statement” appears 2 times in this problem -- it should be important for this problem! “assignment” appears in a lot of problems -- it should be trivial for this problem!

Intuition 2: When “nested loops” appears, students always get it wrong -- it should be important for this problem!

Intuition 3: Expert labeled “assignment”, “less than” as prerequisite concepts, while “nested loops”, “for statement” as outcome concepts --- outcome concepts should be the important ones for current problem!

Page 9: + Doing More with Less : Student Modeling and Performance Prediction with Reduced Content Models Yun Huang, University of Pittsburgh Yanbo Xu, Carnegie.

+Reduction Methods

Content-based methods A problem = a document, a KC = a word Use IDF and TFIDF keyword weighting approach

to compute KC importance score.

Response-based Method Train a logistic regression (PFA) to predict student

response Use the coefficient representing the initial

easiness (EASINESS-COEF) of a KC.

Expert-based Method Use only the OUTCOME concepts as the KCs for an item.

Page 10: + Doing More with Less : Student Modeling and Performance Prediction with Reduced Content Models Yun Huang, University of Pittsburgh Yanbo Xu, Carnegie.

+Item-level ranking of KC importance

For each method, we define SCORE function assigning a score to a KC in an item The higher the score, the more important a

KC is in an item.

Then, we do item-level ranking : a KC's importance can be differentiated by different score values, or/and by its different ranking positions in different

items

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+Reduction Sizes

What is the best number of KCs each method should reduce to? Reducing non-adaptively to items (TopX):

Select x KCs per item with the highest importance scores.

Reducing adaptively to items (TopX%): Select x% KCs per item with the highest importance scores

Page 12: + Doing More with Less : Student Modeling and Performance Prediction with Reduced Content Models Yun Huang, University of Pittsburgh Yanbo Xu, Carnegie.

+ Evaluating Reduction on PFA and KT

We evaluate by the prediction performance of two popular student modeling and performance prediction models Performance Factor Analysis (PFA): logistic

regression model predicting student response Knowledge Tracing (KT): Hidden Markov

Models predicting student response and inferring student knowledge level

*We select a variant that can handle multiple KCs.

Page 13: + Doing More with Less : Student Modeling and Performance Prediction with Reduced Content Models Yun Huang, University of Pittsburgh Yanbo Xu, Carnegie.

+Outline

Motivation

Content Model Reduction

Experiments and Results

Conclusion and Future Work

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+Tutoring System

Collected from JavaGuide, a tutor for learning Java programming.

Each question is generated from a template, and students can try multiple attempts

Students give values for a variable or the output

Java code

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+Experimental Setup Dataset

19, 809 observations, about 69.3% correct 132 students on 94 question templates (items) A problem is indexed into 9 ~ 55 KCs, 124 KCs in total

Classification metric: Area Under Curve (AUC) 1: perfect classifier, 0.5: random classifier

Cross-validation: Two runs of 5-fold CV where in each run 80% of the users are in train, and the remaining are in test.

We list the mean AUC on test sets across the 10 runs, and use Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test (alpha = 0.05) to test AUC comparison significance.

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+Reduction v.s. original on PFA

Flat (or roughly in bell shapes) with fluctuations Reduction to a moderate size can provide comparable

or even better prediction than using original content models.

Reduction could hurt if the size goes too small (e.g. < 5), possibly because PFA was designed for fitting items with multiple KCs.

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+Reduction v.s. original on KT

Reduction provides gain ranging a much bigger span and scale!

KT achieves the best performance when the reduction size is small: it may be more sensitive than PFA to the size!

Our reduction methods have selected promising KCs that are the important ones for KT making predictions!

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+Automatic v.s. expert-based (OUTCOME) reduction method

IDF and TFIDF can be comparable to or outperform OUTCOME method!

E-COEF provides much gain on KT than PFA, suggesting PFA coefficients can provide useful extra information for reducing the KT content models.

(+/−: signicantly better/worse than OUTCOME, : the optimal mean AUC)

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+Outline

Motivation

Content Model Reduction

Experiments and Results

Conclusion and Future Work

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+

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not

simpler.”-- Albert Einstein

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+Conclusion

“Content model should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Given the proper reduction size, reduction

enables prediction performance better! Different model reacts to reduction differently!

KT is more sensitive to reduction than PFA Different models achieve the best balance

between model complexity and model fit in different ranges

We are the first to explore reduction extensively! More ideas for selecting important KCs? Larger datasets? Other domains?

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+Acknowledgement

Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative (http://www.adlnet.gov/).

LearnLab 2013 Summer School at CMU (Dr. Kenneth R. Koedinger, Dr. Jose P. Gonzalez-Brenes, Dr. Zachary A. Pardos for advising and initiating the project)

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+

Thank you for listening !