KTCF: Actionable Recourse in Knowledge Tracing via Counterfactual Explanations for Education

TL;DR

This paper introduces KTCF, a novel counterfactual explanation method for Knowledge Tracing in education, providing actionable, causal insights that improve student modeling and educational instruction, with demonstrated superior performance.

Contribution

We propose KTCF, a new counterfactual explanation approach for KT that incorporates concept relationships and translates explanations into educational instructions.

Findings

KTCF outperforms existing methods with 5.7% to 34% improvements.

The educational instructions reduce study burden effectively.

Counterfactual explanations enhance responsible AI use in education.

Abstract

Using Artificial Intelligence to improve teaching and learning benefits greater adaptivity and scalability in education. Knowledge Tracing (KT) is recognized for student modeling task due to its superior performance and application potential in education. To this end, we conceptualize and investigate counterfactual explanation as the connection from XAI for KT to education. Counterfactual explanations offer actionable recourse, are inherently causal and local, and easy for educational stakeholders to understand who are often non-experts. We propose KTCF, a counterfactual explanation generation method for KT that accounts for knowledge concept relationships, and a post-processing scheme that converts a counterfactual explanation into a sequence of educational instructions. We experiment on a large-scale educational dataset and show our KTCF method achieves superior and robust performance over existing methods, with improvements ranging from 5.7% to 34% across metrics. Additionally, we provide a qualitative evaluation of our post-processing scheme, demonstrating that the resulting educational instructions help in reducing large study burden. We show that counterfactuals have the potential to advance the responsible and practical use of AI in education. Future works on XAI for KT may benefit from educationally grounded conceptualization and developing stakeholder-centered methods.