Finding an optimal learning trajectory is an important question in educational systems. Existing Artificial Intelligence in Education (AiEd) technologies mostly used indirect methods to make the learning process efficient such as recommending contents based on difficulty adjustment, weakness analysis, learning theory, psychometric analysis, or domain specific rules.

Student dropout prediction provides an opportunity to improve student engagement, which maximizes the overall effectiveness of learning experiences. However, researches on student dropout were mainly conducted on school dropout or course dropout, and study session dropout in a mobile learning environment has not been considered thoroughly. In this paper, we investigate the study session dropout prediction problem in a mobile learning environment. First, we define the concept of the study session, study session dropout and study session dropout prediction task in a mobile learning environment. Based on the definitions, we propose a novel Transformer based model for predicting study session dropout, DAS: Deep Attentive Study Session Dropout Prediction in Mobile Learning Environment. DAS has an encoder-decoder structure which is composed of stacked multi-head attention and point-wise feed-forward networks. The deep attentive computations in DAS are capable of capturing complex relations among dynamic student interactions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to investigate study session dropout in a mobile learning environment. Empirical evaluations on a large-scale dataset show that DAS achieves the best performance with a significant improvement in area under the receiver operating characteristic curve compared to baseline models.

In this paper, we propose a novel Transformer-based model for knowledge tracing, SAINT: Separated Self-AttentIve Neural Knowledge Tracing. SAINT has an encoder-decoder structure where the exercise and response embedding sequences separately enter, respectively, the encoder and the decoder. The encoder applies self-attention layers to the sequence of exercise embeddings, and the decoder alternately applies self-attention layers and encoder-decoder attention layers to the sequence of response embeddings. This separation of input allows us to stack attention layers multiple times, resulting in an improvement in area under receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to suggest an encoder-decoder model for knowledge tracing that applies deep self-attentive layers to exercises and responses separately. We empirically evaluate SAINT on a large-scale knowledge tracing dataset, EdNet, collected by an active mobile education application, Santa, which has 627,347 users, 72,907,005 response data points as well as a set of 16,175 exercises gathered since 2016. The results show that SAINT achieves state-of-the-art performance in knowledge tracing with an improvement of 1.8% in AUC compared to the current state-of-the-art model.