Using Behavioral Primitives to Model Students’ Digital Behavior

Abstract

The rapid and intense development of distance learning in recent years has led to increasingly comprehensive solutions, recording students’ activity in the form of learning traces. Adapted learning systems can exploit this data to analyze students’ behavior and help them be more successful in their learning process. In this paper, we propose an approach that is new in data mining, which consists of representing the behavioral dynamics of a set of students through Behavioral Primitives. A Behavioral Primitive represents the temporal evolution of learning indicators to model the behavior of a group of students. The primitive then corresponds to a dynamic distribution, representing both the mean values and the variance of specific indicators over time. We experiment this method on a known, widely used, and open dataset (OULAD). Our results confirm the relevance of the proposed methodology to characterize students’ behaviors intelligibly and visually while respecting each student's anonymity. Our work provides a powerful and explainable tool for educational actors. It allows them to analyze learners’ behaviors and perform pedagogical actions.