Practicing in quiz, assessing in quiz: A quiz-based neural network approach for knowledge tracing.

Abstract

Online learning has demonstrated superiority in connecting high-quality educational resources to a global audience. To ensure an excellent learning experience with sustainable and opportune learning instructions, online learning systems must comprehend learners' evolving knowledge states based on their learning interactions, known as the Knowledge Tracing (KT) task. Generally, learners practice through various quizzes, each comprising several exercises that cover similar knowledge concepts. Therefore, their learning interactions are continuous within each quiz but discrete across different quizzes. However, existing methods overlook the quiz structure and assume all learning interactions are uniformly distributed. We argue that learners' knowledge states should also be assessed in quiz since they practiced in quiz. To achieve this goal, we present a novel Quiz-based Knowledge Tracing (QKT) model, which effectively integrates the quiz structure of learning interactions. This is achieved by designing two distinct modules by neural networks: one for intra-quiz modeling and another for inter-quiz fusion. Extensive experimental results on public real-world datasets demonstrate that QKT achieves new state-of-the-art performance. The findings of this study suggest that incorporating the quiz structure of learning interactions can efficiently comprehend learners' knowledge states with fewer quizzes, and provides valuable insights into designing effective quizzes with fewer exercises.