KT4EQG: Personalized Exercise Question Generation via Knowledge Tracing

Abstract: Educational Question Generation (EQG) aims to synthesize customized exercise questions that enhance student learning. An effective EQG system should ideally personalize questions for each student by modeling the student's knowledge state and generating questions that provide the greatest learning benefit. However, few existing EQG approaches are able to achieve such fine-grained personalization. In this paper, we explore how EQG can benefit from knowledge tracing (KT), which models students' knowledge states based on historical performance and predicts future performance. We propose KT4EQG, a personalized EQG framework that generates effective questions for individual students under the guidance of a KT model. Specifically, KT4EQG seeks to maximize a student's potential improvement in overall knowledge mastery by leveraging the KT model to select the most suitable knowledge concept for the student to practice. An LLM-based question generator is then trained to produce a question faithfully grounded in the selected concept. Experimental results on XES3G5M and MOOCRadar show that KT4EQG consistently generates more effective questions than methods with limited or no personalization.