Graph knowledge tracing in cognitive situation: Validation of classic assertions in cognitive psychology

Abstract

Knowledge Tracing (KT) is a fundamental and challenging task in intelligent education, aiming to trace learners’ knowledge states and learning processes, providing better support and guidance for teaching and addressing mental factors. Previous KT tasks have focused on considering learners’ exposure to extrinsic environmental factors while ignoring the influence of intrinsic psychological factors. Moreover, previous methods have adopted a single perspective in modeling learners’ knowledge states, ignoring the diversity of states in the learning process. To address these issues, we define the concept of cognitive situation through the guidance of cognitive psychology theory to help to explain the extrinsic influence and intrinsic cognition of learners within complex learning environments. Moreover, we design a Cognitive Situation-based Graph KT (CSGKT) model to quantify learners’ influences in the cognitive process by modeling schemas capturing intrinsic characteristics and extrinsic factors through Hyper-Graph Neural Networks (HGNN). Second, we utilize a Directed Graph Convolutional Neural Network (DGCNN) to capture the correlation information between knowledge concepts and structure the learner’s cognitive activities and knowledge states, adding a detailed representation of multiple states of the learning process. In addition, we use the Erase-add Gate to filter out the knowledge states that do not match the learner’s current cognitive activities to stabilize the learner’s due cognition. In our experiments, we selected nine baseline models from three mainstream approaches, including sequence-based approaches, Transformer-based approaches, and complex structure-based approaches. The experimental results show that our models outperform these baseline models. At the same time, we also verify two classic assertions in cognitive psychology, namely, the “short-term memory forgetting of knowledge concepts is mainly caused by interference rather than memory trace fading” and the “cognitive imagery and perceptual function play an equivalent role in the cognitive process”, which further support the feasibility of the model.