Student Modeling for Personalized Education: A Review of the Literature

The rapid development of computer technology and e-learning reinforces the need of dynamic adaptation to the needs of each individual student. Adaptation is performed through the student model, which is a crucial module of an Intelligent Tutoring System. There are many student modeling techniques and approaches. In this chapter, a review of the literature concerning student modeling during the past decade is presented. The aim is to answer the three basic questions on student modeling: what to model, how and why. This chapter presents comparative tables that are the results of a 10-year review study in student modeling. They reveal either the most common modeled student’s characteristic, or the student modeling approaches that are preferred in relation to student modeling characteristics. So, the particular chapter can be, also, used as a guide for making decisions about the techniques that should be adopted when designing a student model for an adaptive tutoring system.