Enhancing personalized learning: AI-driven identification of learning styles and content modification strategies

Abstract

In the rapidly advancing era of educational technology, customized learning materials have the potential to enhance individuals’ learning capacities. This research endeavors to devise an effective method for detecting a learner’s preferred learning style and subsequently adapting the learning content to align with that style, utilizing artificial intelligence AI techniques. Our investigation finds that analyzing learners’ web tracking logs for activity classification and categorizing individual responses for feedback classification are highly effective methods for identifying a learner’s learning styles, such as visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. A custom dataset has been constructed in this research comprising approximately 506 samples and 22 features utilizing the Moodle learning management system (LMS), successfully categorizing students into their respective learning styles. Furthermore, decision tree, random forest, support vector machine (SVM), logistic regression, XGBoost, blending ensemble, and convolutional neural network (CNN) algorithms with corresponding optimized hyperparameters and synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) have been applied for learning behavior classification. The blending ensemble technique with the XGBoost meta-learning model accomplished the best performance for learning style detection with an accuracy of 97.56%. Next, the text content of the electronic documents is modified by employing different natural language processing (NLP) techniques, including named entity recognition of spaCy, knowledge graph, generative pre-trained transformer 3 (GPT-3), and text-to-text transfer transformer (T5) model, to accommodate diverse learning styles. Various approaches, such as color coding, audio scripts, mind maps, flashcards, etc., are implemented to adapt the content effectively for the detected categories of learners. The spaCy NLP-based named entity recognition (NER) model demonstrates a 94.16% F1 score and 0.92 exact match ratio for color coding text generation of ten electronic documents comprising 790 distinct individual words. These modifications aim to cater to the unique preferences of learners, fostering a more personalized and engaging educational experience. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time an integrated learning style detection and content modification system has been developed in this work utilizing efficient AI techniques and a private dataset.