Jindi Wang

Zhaoxing Li, Jujie Yang, Jindi Wang et al.

The field of Knowledge Tracing aims to understand how students learn and master knowledge over time by analyzing their historical behaviour data. To achieve this goal, many researchers have proposed Knowledge Tracing models that use data from Intelligent Tutoring Systems to predict students' subsequent actions. However, with the development of Intelligent Tutoring Systems, large-scale datasets containing long-sequence data began to emerge. Recent deep learning based Knowledge Tracing models face obstacles such as low efficiency, low accuracy, and low interpretability when dealing with large-scale datasets containing long-sequence data. To address these issues and promote the sustainable development of Intelligent Tutoring Systems, we propose a LSTM BERT-based Knowledge Tracing model for long sequence data processing, namely LBKT, which uses a BERT-based architecture with a Rasch model-based embeddings block to deal with different difficulty levels information and an LSTM block to process the sequential characteristic in students' actions. LBKT achieves the best performance on most benchmark datasets on the metrics of ACC and AUC. Additionally, an ablation study is conducted to analyse the impact of each component of LBKT's overall performance. Moreover, we used t-SNE as the visualisation tool to demonstrate the model's embedding strategy. The results indicate that LBKT is faster, more interpretable, and has a lower memory cost than the traditional deep learning based Knowledge Tracing methods.

Zhaoxing Li, Vahid Yazdanpanah, Jindi Wang et al.

The integration of AI in education offers significant potential to enhance learning efficiency. Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Llama, allow students to query a wide range of topics, providing unprecedented flexibility. However, LLMs face challenges, such as handling varying content relevance and lack of personalization. To address these challenges, we propose TutorLLM, a personalized learning recommender LLM system based on Knowledge Tracing (KT) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). The novelty of TutorLLM lies in its unique combination of KT and RAG techniques with LLMs, which enables dynamic retrieval of context-specific knowledge and provides personalized learning recommendations based on the student's personal learning state. Specifically, this integration allows TutorLLM to tailor responses based on individual learning states predicted by the Multi-Features with Latent Relations BERT-based KT (MLFBK) model and to enhance response accuracy with a Scraper model. The evaluation includes user assessment questionnaires and performance metrics, demonstrating a 10% improvement in user satisfaction and a 5\% increase in quiz scores compared to using general LLMs alone.

Jindi Wang, Yidi Zhang, Zhaoxing Li

This study presents DeBERTa-KC, a transformer-based model for automatic classification of knowledge construction (KC) levels in online science learning discourse. Using comments collected from four popular YouTube science channels (2022--2024), a balanced corpus of 20,000 manually annotated samples was created across four KC categories: \textit{nonKC}, \textit{Share}, \textit{Explore}, and \textit{Negotiate}. The proposed model extends DeBERTa-v3 with Focal Loss, Label Smoothing, and R-Drop regularization to address class imbalance and enhance generalization. A reproducible end-to-end pipeline was implemented, encompassing data extraction, annotation, preprocessing, training, and evaluation. Across 10-fold stratified cross-validation, DeBERTa-KC achieved a macro-F1 of $0.836 \pm 0.008$, significantly out-performing both classical and transformer baselines ($p<0.01$). Per-category results indicate strong sensitivity to higher-order epistemic engagement, particularly in \textit{Explore} and \textit{Negotiate} discourse. These findings demonstrate that large language models can effectively capture nuanced indicators of knowledge construction in informal digital learning environments, offering scalable, theory-informed approaches to discourse analysis and the development of automated tools for assessing epistemic engagement.