An Ensemble Approach for Question-Level Knowledge Tracing

Knowledge tracing—where a machine models the students’ knowledge as they interact with coursework—is a well-established area in the field of Artificial Intelligence in Education. In this paper, an ensemble approach is proposed that addresses existing limitations in question-centric knowledge tracing and achieves the goal of predicting future question correctness. The proposed approach consists of two models; one is Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM) built by incorporating all relevant key features engineered from the data. The second model is a Multiheaded-Self-Attention Knowledge Tracing model (MSAKT) that extracts historical student knowledge of future question by calculating their contextual similarity with previously attempted questions. The proposed model’s effectiveness is evaluated by conducting experiments on a big Kaggle dataset achieving an Area Under ROC Curve (AUC) score of 0.84 with 84% accuracy using 10fold cross-validation.