Incorporating Features Learned by an Enhanced Deep Knowledge Tracing Model for STEM/Non-STEM Job Prediction

TL;DR

This paper develops a predictive model for STEM/non-STEM job outcomes using deep knowledge tracing features combined with student profile data, demonstrating improved accuracy over profile-only models.

Contribution

It introduces an enhanced deep knowledge tracing model (DKT+) to extract features that improve job prediction accuracy in educational data mining.

Findings

Models with combined features outperform profile-only models.

STEM students show higher mastery and learning gains in mathematics.

Enhanced DKT+ improves knowledge state estimation.

Abstract

The 2017 ASSISTments Data Mining competition aims to use data from a longitudinal study for predicting a brand-new outcome of students which had never been studied before by the educational data mining research community. Specifically, it facilitates research in developing predictive models that predict whether the first job of a student out of college belongs to a STEM (the acronym for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) field. This is based on the student's learning history on the ASSISTments blended learning platform in the form of extensive clickstream data gathered during the middle school years. To tackle this challenge, we first estimate the expected knowledge state of students with respect to different mathematical skills using a deep knowledge tracing (DKT) model and an enhanced DKT (DKT+) model. We then combine the features corresponding to the DKT/DKT+ expected knowledge state with other features extracted directly from the student profile in the dataset to train several machine learning models for the STEM/non-STEM job prediction. Our experiments show that models trained with the combined features generally perform better than the models trained with the student profile alone. Detailed analysis of the student's knowledge state reveals that, when compared with non-STEM students, STEM students generally show a higher mastery level and a higher learning gain in mathematics.