Beyond knowledge tracing: Modeling skill topologies with bayesian networks

Modeling and predicting student knowledge is a fundamental task of an intelligent tutoring system. A popular approach for student modeling is Bayesian Knowledge Tracing (BKT). BKT models, however, lack the ability to describe the hierarchy and relationships between the different skills of a learning domain. In this work, we therefore aim at increasing the representational power of the student model by employing dynamic Bayesian networks that are able to represent such skill topologies. To ensure model interpretability, we constrain the parameter space. We evaluate the performance of our models on five large-scale data sets of different learning domains such as mathematics, spelling learning and physics, and demonstrate that our approach outperforms BKT in prediction accuracy on unseen data across all learning domains.