The recently proposed SPARse Factor Analysis (SPARFA) framework for personalized learning performs factor analysis on ordinal or binary-valued (e.g., correct/incorrect) graded learner responses to questions. The underlying factors are termed concepts
(or knowledge components) and are used for learning analytics (LA), the estimation of learner concept-knowledge profiles, and for content analytics (CA), the estimation of question-concept associations and question difficulties. While SPARFA is a powerful tool for LA and CA, it requires a number of algorithm parameters (including the number of concepts), which are difficult to determine in practice. In this paper, we propose SPARFA-Lite, a convex optimization-based method for LA that builds on matrix completion, which only requires a single algorithm parameter and enables us to automatically identify the required number of concepts. Using a variety of educational datasets, we demonstrate that SPARFALite (i) achieves comparable performance in predicting unobserved learner responses to existing methods, including item response theory (IRT) and SPARFA, and (ii) is computationally more efficient.
We propose SPARFA-Trace, a new machine learning-based framework for time-varying learning and content analytics for education applications. We develop a novel message passing-based, blind, approximate Kalman filter for sparse factor analysis (SPARFA)
, that jointly (i) traces learner concept knowledge over time, (ii) analyzes learner concept knowledge state transitions (induced by interacting with learning resources, such as textbook sections, lecture videos, etc, or the forgetting effect), and (iii) estimates the content organization and intrinsic difficulty of the assessment questions. These quantities are estimated solely from binary-valued (correct/incorrect) graded learner response data and a summary of the specific actions each learner performs (e.g., answering a question or studying a learning resource) at each time instance. Experimental results on two online course datasets demonstrate that SPARFA-Trace is capable of tracing each learners concept knowledge evolution over time, as well as analyzing the quality and content organization of learning resources, the question-concept associations, and the question intrinsic difficulties. Moreover, we show that SPARFA-Trace achieves comparable or better performance in predicting unobserved learner responses than existing collaborative filtering and knowledge tracing approaches for personalized education.
