Leveraging Pedagogical Theories to Understand Student Learning Process with Graph-based Reasonable Knowledge Tracing

Abstract: Knowledge tracing (KT) is a crucial task in intelligent education, focusing on predicting students' performance on given questions to trace their evolving knowledge. The advancement of deep learning in this field has led to deep-learning knowledge tracing (DLKT) models that prioritize high predictive accuracy. However, many existing DLKT methods overlook the fundamental goal of tracking students' dynamical knowledge mastery. These models do not explicitly model knowledge mastery tracing processes or yield unreasonable results that educators find difficulty to comprehend and apply in real teaching scenarios. In response, our research conducts a preliminary analysis of mainstream KT approaches to highlight and explain such unreasonableness. We introduce GRKT, a graph-based reasonable knowledge tracing method to address these issues. By leveraging graph neural networks, our approach delves into the mutual influences of knowledge concepts, offering a more accurate representation of how the knowledge mastery evolves throughout the learning process. Additionally, we propose a fine-grained and psychological three-stage modeling process as knowledge retrieval, memory strengthening, and knowledge learning/forgetting, to conduct a more reasonable knowledge tracing process. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that GRKT outperforms eleven baselines across three datasets, not only enhancing predictive accuracy but also generating more reasonable knowledge tracing results. This makes our model a promising advancement for practical implementation in educational settings. The source code is available at https://github.com/JJCui96/GRKT.