Tracing Knowledge States through Student Assessment in a Blended Learning Environment

Abstract

Blended learning has recently acquired popularity in a variety of educational settings. This approach has the advantage of being able to autonomously monitor students' knowledge states using the collected learning data. Moodle is the most widely used learning management system in blended learning environments. Students can access Moodle to obtain supplementary materials, exercises, and assessments to complement their face-to-face meetings. However, its performance can be improved by more effectively tailoring students' skills and pace of learning. Several studies have been conducted on knowledge tracing; however, we have not discovered any studies that particularly investigate knowledge tracing in a blended learning setting with Moodle as a component. This study proposes a scheme for assessment using the features of the Moodle quiz platform. The assessment data is used to conduct knowledge tracing with the Bayesian Knowledge Tracing (BKT) model, which improves interpretability. The aforementioned data were collected from information engineering undergraduate students who completed 88 exercises that assessed 23 knowledge components within the course. We measure RMSE and MAE to evaluate the performance of the BKT model on our dataset. Furthermore, we compare the knowledge tracing performance to other well-known datasets. Our results show that the BKT model performed better with our dataset, with an RMSE of 0.314 and an MAE of 0.197. Moreover, the BKT model can be used to assess student performance and determine the level of mastery for each knowledge component. Thus, the outcomes can be applied to personalized learning in the future.