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Investigating the Robustness of Knowledge Tracing Models in the Presence of Student Concept Drift

Published: November 1, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2511.00704v2

By: Morgan Lee , Artem Frenk , Eamon Worden and more

Potential Business Impact:

Helps online learning systems adapt to student changes.

Business Areas:
Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence, Data and Analytics, Software

Knowledge Tracing (KT) has been an established problem in the educational data mining field for decades, and it is commonly assumed that the underlying learning process being modeled remains static. Given the ever-changing landscape of online learning platforms (OLPs), we investigate how concept drift and changing student populations can impact student behavior within an OLP through testing model performance both within a single academic year and across multiple academic years. Four well-studied KT models were applied to five academic years of data to assess how susceptible KT models are to concept drift. Through our analysis, we find that all four families of KT models can exhibit degraded performance, Bayesian Knowledge Tracing (BKT) remains the most stable KT model when applied to newer data, while more complex, attention based models lose predictive power significantly faster.

Country of Origin
🇺🇸 United States

Page Count
10 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Machine Learning (CS)