# Prerequisite-driven Q-matrix Refinement for Learner Knowledge Assessment: A Case Study in Online Learning Context

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.12642 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12642/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Knowledge Tracing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.05908/) (2015)
- [Context-Aware Attentive Knowledge Tracing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12324/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Key-Value Memory Networks for Knowledge Tracing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08108/) (2016)
- [EdNet: A Large-Scale Hierarchical Dataset in Education](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03072/) (2019)
- [RKT : Relation-Aware Self-Attention for Knowledge Tracing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12736/) (2020)
- [SAINT+: Integrating Temporal Features for EdNet Correctness Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12042/) (2020)
- [GIKT: A Graph-based Interaction Model for Knowledge Tracing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.05991/) (2020)
- [Knowledge Tracing Machines: Factorization Machines for Knowledge Tracing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.03388/) (2018)
- [Exploiting Cognitive Structure for Adaptive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12470/) (2019)
- [Improving Knowledge Tracing via Pre-training Question Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05031/) (2020)
- [DAS3H: Modeling Student Learning and Forgetting for Optimally Scheduling Distributed Practice of Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06873/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The ever growing abundance of learning traces in the online learning platforms promises unique insights into the learner knowledge assessment (LKA), a fundamental personalized-tutoring technique for enabling various further adaptive tutoring services in these platforms. Precise assessment of learner knowledge requires the fine-grained Q-matrix, which is generally designed by experts to map the items to skills in the domain. Due to the subjective tendency, some misspecifications may degrade the performance of LKA. Some efforts have been made to refine the small-scale Q-matrix, however, it is difficult to extend the scalability and apply these methods to the large-scale online learning context with numerous items and massive skills. Moreover, the existing LKA models employ flexible deep learning models that excel at this task, but the adequacy of LKA is still challenged by the representation capability of the models on the quite sparse item-skill graph and the learners' exercise data. To overcome these issues, in this paper we propose a prerequisite-driven Q-matrix refinement framework for learner knowledge assessment (PQRLKA) in online context. We infer the prerequisites from learners' response data and use it to refine the expert-defined Q-matrix, which enables the interpretability and the scalability to apply it to the large-scale online learning context. Based on the refined Q-matrix, we propose a Metapath2Vec enhanced convolutional representation method to obtain the comprehensive representations of the items with rich information, and feed them to the PQRLKA model to finally assess the learners' knowledge. Experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate the capability of our model to infer the prerequisites for Q-matrix refinement, and also its superiority for the LKA task.