Predictive Student Modeling in Educational Games with Multi-Task Learning

Game-based learning environments have the distinctive capacity to promote learning experiences that are both engaging and effective. Recent advances in sensor-based technologies (e.g., facial expression analysis and eye gaze tracking) and natural language processing have introduced the opportunity to leverage multimodal data streams for learning analytics. Learning analytics and student modeling informed by multimodal data captured during students' interactions with game-based learning environments hold significant promise for designing effective learning environments that detect unproductive student behaviors and provide adaptive support for students during learning. Learning analytics frameworks that can accurately predict student learning outcomes early in students' interactions hold considerable promise for enabling environments to dynamically adapt to individual student needs. In this paper, we investigate a multimodal, multi-task predictive student modeling framework for game-based learning environments. The framework is evaluated on two datasets of game-based learning interactions from two student populations (n=61 and n=118) who interacted with two versions of a game-based learning environment for microbiology education. The framework leverages available multimodal data channels from the datasets to simultaneously predict student post-test performance and interest. In addition to inducing models for each dataset individually, this work investigates the ability to use information learned from one source dataset to improve models based on another target dataset (i.e., transfer learning using pre-trained models). Results from a series of ablation experiments indicate the differences in predictive capacity among a combination of modalities including gameplay, eye gaze, facial expressions, and reflection text for predicting the two target variables. In addition, multi-task models were able to improve predictive performance compared to single-task baselines for one target variable, but not both. Lastly, transfer learning showed promise in improving predictive capacity in both datasets.