Papers › A Hierarchical Probabilistic Framework for Incremental Knowledge Tracing in Classroom Settings

A Hierarchical Probabilistic Framework for Incremental Knowledge Tracing in Classroom Settings

11 Jun 2025arXiv:2506.09393archive 2025-07-28

Xinyi Gao, Qiucheng Wu, Yang Zhang, Xuechen Liu, Kaizhi Qian, Ying Xu, Shiyu Chang

Knowledge tracing (KT) aims to estimate a student's evolving knowledge state and predict their performance on new exercises based on performance history. Many realistic classroom settings for KT are typically low-resource in data and require online updates as students' exercise history grows, which creates significant challenges for existing KT approaches. To restore strong performance under low-resource conditions, we revisit the hierarchical knowledge concept (KC) information, which is typically available in many classroom settings and can provide strong prior when data are sparse. We therefore propose Knowledge-Tree-based Knowledge Tracing (KT²), a probabilistic KT framework that models student understanding over a tree-structured hierarchy of knowledge concepts using a Hidden Markov Tree Model. KT² estimates student mastery via an EM algorithm and supports personalized prediction through an incremental update mechanism as new responses arrive. Our experiments show that KT² consistently outperforms strong baselines in realistic online, low-resource settings.

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