Bayesian Student Modeling in the AC&NL Tutor

The reasoning process about the level of student’s knowledge can be challenging even for experienced human tutors. The Bayesian networks are a formalism for reasoning under uncertainty, which has been successfully used for various artificial intelligence applications, including student modeling. While Bayesian networks are a highly flexible graphical and probabilistic modeling framework, its main challenges are related to the structural design and the definition of “a priori” and conditional probabilities. Since the AC&NL Tutor’s authoring tool automatically generates tutoring elements of different linguistic complexity, the generated sentences and questions fall into three difficulty levels. Based on these levels, the probability-based Bayesian student model is proposed for mastery-based learning in intelligent tutoring system. The Bayesian network structure is defined by generated questions related to the node representing knowledge in a sentence. Also, there are relations between inverse questions at the same difficulty level. After the structure is defined, the process of assigning “a priori” and conditional probabilities is automated using several heuristic expert-based rules.