HELP-DKT: an interpretable cognitive model of how students learn programming based on deep knowledge tracing

Student cognitive models are playing an essential role in intelligent online tutoring for programming courses. These models capture students’ learning interactions and store them in the form of a set of binary responses, thereby failing to utilize rich educational information in the learning process. Moreover, the recent development of these models has been focused on improving the prediction performance and tended to adopt deep neural networks in building the end-to-end prediction frameworks. Although this approach can provide an improved prediction performance, it may also cause difficulties in interpreting the student’s learning status, which is crucial for providing personalized educational feedback. To address this problem, this paper provides an interpretable cognitive model named HELP-DKT, which can infer how students learn programming based on deep knowledge tracing. HELP-DKT has two major advantages. First, it implements a feature-rich input layer, where the raw codes of students are encoded to vector representations, and the error classifications as concept indicators are incorporated. Second, it can infer meaningful estimation of student abilities while reliably predicting future performance. The experiments confirm that HELP-DKT can achieve good prediction performance and present reasonable interpretability of student skills improvement. In practice, HELP-DKT can personalize the learning experience of novice learners.