ERIC Number: ED675525
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2024
Pages: 12
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: 0000-00-00
A Generalized Apprenticeship Learning Framework for Modeling Heterogeneous Student Pedagogical Strategies
Md. Mirajul Islam; Xi Yang; John Hostetter; Adittya Soukarjya Saha; Min Chi
International Educational Data Mining Society, Paper presented at the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM) (17th, Atlanta, GA, Jul 14-17, 2024)
A key challenge in e-learning environments like Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) is to induce effective pedagogical policies efficiently. While Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) often suffers from "sample inefficiency" and "reward function" design difficulty, Apprenticeship Learning (AL) algorithms can overcome them. However, most AL algorithms can not handle heterogeneity as they assume all demonstrations are generated with a homogeneous policy driven by a single reward function. Still, some AL algorithms which consider heterogeneity, often can not generalize to large continuous state space and only work with discrete states. In this paper, we propose an expectation-maximization (EM)-EDM, a general AL framework to induce effective pedagogical policies from given optimal or near-optimal demonstrations, which are assumed to be driven by heterogeneous reward functions. We compare the effectiveness of the policies induced by our proposed EM-EDM against four AL-based baselines and two policies induced by DRL on two different but related tasks that involve pedagogical action prediction. Our overall results showed that, for both tasks, EM-EDM outperforms the four AL baselines across all performance metrics and the two DRL baselines. This suggests that EM-EDM can effectively model complex student pedagogical decision-making processes through the ability to manage a large, continuous state space and adapt to handle diverse and heterogeneous reward functions with very few given demonstrations. [For the complete proceedings, see ED675485.]
Descriptors: Electronic Learning, Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Teaching Methods, Algorithms, Apprenticeships, Educational Policy, Artificial Intelligence, Decision Making, Rewards, Problem Solving
International Educational Data Mining Society. e-mail: admin@educationaldatamining.org; Web site: https://educationaldatamining.org/conferences/
Publication Type: Reports - Research; Speeches/Meeting Papers
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: 2112635; 2013502; 1726550; 1651909
Author Affiliations: N/A

Peer reviewed
