Teaching plays a fundamental role in human learning. Typically, a human teaching strategy involves assessing a student’s knowledge progress for tailoring the teaching materials to enhance the learning progress. A human teacher can achieve this by tracing a student’s knowledge over essential learning concepts in a task. Albeit, such a teaching strategy is not well exploited yet in machine learning as current machine teaching methods tend to directly assess the progress of individual training samples without paying attention to the underlying learning concepts in a learning task. In this paper, we propose a novel method, called Knowledge Augmented Data Teaching (KADT), which can optimize a data teaching strategy for a student model by tracing its knowledge progress over multiple learning concepts in a learning task. Specifically, the KADT method incorporates a knowledge tracing model to dynamically capture the knowledge progress of a student model in terms of latent learning concepts. We further develop an attention-pooling mechanism to distill knowledge representations of a student model with respect to class labels, which enables to develop a data teaching strategy on critical training samples. We have evaluated the performance of the KADT method on four different machine learning tasks, including knowledge tracing, sentiment analysis, movie recommendation, and image classification. The KADT method consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on all these tasks.

Tracing a student's knowledge is vital for tailoring the learning experience. Recent knowledge tracing methods tend to respond to these challenges by modelling knowledge state dynamics across learning concepts. However, they still suffer from several inherent challenges including: modelling forgetting behaviors and identifying relationships among latent concepts. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a novel knowledge tracing model, namelyDeep Graph Memory Network(DGMN). In this model, we incorporate a forget gating mechanism into an attention memory structure in order to capture forgetting behaviors dynamically during the knowledge tracing process. Particularly, this forget gating mechanism is built upon attention forgetting features over latent concepts considering their mutual dependencies. Further, this model has the capability of learning relationships between latent concepts from a dynamic latent concept graph in light of a student's evolving knowledge states. A comprehensive experimental evaluation has been conducted using four well-established benchmark datasets. The results show that DGMN consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art KT models over all the datasets. The effectiveness of modelling forgetting behaviors and learning latent concept graphs has also been analyzed in our experiments.

Can machines trace human knowledge like humans? Knowledge tracing (KT) is a fundamental task in a wide range of applications in education, such as massive open online courses (MOOCs), intelligent tutoring systems, educational games, and learning management systems. It models dynamics in a student's knowledge states in relation to different learning concepts through their interactions with learning activities. Recently, several attempts have been made to use deep learning models for tackling the KT problem. Although these deep learning models have shown promising results, they have limitations: either lack the ability to go deeper to trace how specific concepts in a knowledge state are mastered by a student, or fail to capture long-term dependencies in an exercise sequence. In this paper, we address these limitations by proposing a novel deep learning model for knowledge tracing, namely Sequential Key-Value Memory Networks (SKVMN). This model unifies the strengths of recurrent modelling capacity and memory capacity of the existing deep learning KT models for modelling student learning. We have extensively evaluated our proposed model on five benchmark datasets. The experimental results show that (1) SKVMN outperforms the state-of-the-art KT models on all datasets, (2) SKVMN can better discover the correlation between latent concepts and questions, and (3) SKVMN can trace the knowledge state of students dynamics, and a leverage sequential dependencies in an exercise sequence for improved predication accuracy.