Enhancing Student Performance Prediction on Learnersourced Questions with SGNN-LLM Synergy

As an emerging education strategy, learnersourcing offers the potential for personalized learning content creation, but also grapples with the challenge of predicting student performance due to inherent noise in student-generated data. While graph-based methods excel in capturing dense learner-question interactions, they falter in cold start scenarios, characterized by limited interactions, as seen when questions lack substantial learner responses. In response, we introduce an innovative strategy that synergizes the potential of integrating Signed Graph Neural Networks (SGNNs) and Large Language Model (LLM) embeddings. Our methodology employs a signed bipartite graph to comprehensively model student answers, complemented by a contrastive learning framework that enhances noise resilience. Furthermore, LLM's contribution lies in generating foundational question embeddings, proving especially advantageous in addressing cold start scenarios characterized by limited graph data interactions. Validation across five real-world datasets sourced from the PeerWise platform underscores our approach's effectiveness. Our method outperforms baselines, showcasing enhanced predictive accuracy and robustness.

DeepQR: Neural-based Quality Ratings for Learnersourced Multiple-Choice Questions

Automated question quality rating (AQQR) aims to evaluate question quality through computational means, thereby addressing emerging challenges in online learnersourced question repositories. Existing methods for AQQR rely solely on explicitly-defined criteria such as readability and word count, while not fully utilising the power of state-of-the-art deep-learning techniques. We propose DeepQR, a novel neural-network model for AQQR that is trained using multiple-choice-question (MCQ) datasets collected from PeerWise, a widely-used learnersourcing platform. Along with designing DeepQR, we investigate models based on explicitly-defined features, or semantic features, or both. We also introduce a self-attention mechanism to capture semantic correlations between MCQ components, and a contrastive-learning approach to acquire question representations using quality ratings. Extensive experiments on datasets collected from eight university-level courses illustrate that DeepQR has superior performance over six comparative models.