Diag-Skills: A Diagnosis System Using Belief Functions and Semantic Models in ITS

This work is related to the diagnosis process in intelligent tutoring systems (ITS). This process is usually a complex task that relies on imperfect data. Indeed, learning data may suffer from imprecision, uncertainty, and sometimes contradictions. In this paper, we propose Diag-Skills a diagnosis model that uses the theory of belief functions to capture these imperfections. The objective of this work is twofold: first, a dynamic diagnosis of the evaluated skills, then, the prediction of the state of the non-evaluated ones. We conducted two studies to evaluate the prediction precision of Diag-Skills. The evaluations showed good precision in predictions and almost perfect agreement with the instructor when the model failed to predict the effective state of the skill. Our main premise is that these results will serve as a support to the remediation and the feedbacks given to the learners by providing them a proper personalization.

Artificial Intelligence and Its Role in Education

The objective of this study is to explore the role of artificial intelligence applications (AIA) in education. AI applications provide the solution in many ways to the exponential rise of modern-day challenges, which create difficulties in access to education and learning. They play a significant role in forming social robots (SR), smart learning (SL), and intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) to name a few. The review indicates that the education sector should also embrace the modern methods of teaching and the necessary technology. Looking into the flow, the education sector organizations need to adopt AI technologies as a necessity of the day and education. The study needs to be tested statistically for better understanding and to make the findings more generalized in the future.

A New Approach to Modelling Students’ Socio-Emotional Attributes to Predict Their Performance in Intelligent Tutoring Systems

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) are computer-based learning environments that aim to imitate to the greatest possible extent the behavior of a human tutor in their capacity as a pedagogical and subject expert. One of the major challenges of these systems is to know how to adapt the training both to changing requirements of all kinds and to student knowledge and reactions. The activities recommended by these systems mainly involve active student performance prediction that, nowadays, becomes problematic in the face of the expectations of the present world. In the associated literature, several approaches, using various attributes, have been proposed to solve the problem of performance prediction. However, these approaches have failed to take advantage of the synergistic effect of students' social and emotional factors as better prediction attributes. This paper proposes an approach to predict student performance called SoEmo-WMRMF that exploits not only cognitive abilities, but also group work relationships between students and the impact of their emotions. More precisely, this approach models five types of domain relations through a Weighted Multi-Relational Matrix Factorization (WMRMF) model. An evaluation carried out on a data sample extracted from a survey carried out in a general secondary school showed that the proposed approach gives better performance in terms of reduction of the Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) compared to other models simulated in this paper.