Modeling student knowledge with self-organizing feature maps

The paper describes a novel application of neural networks to model the behavior of students in the context of an intelligent tutoring system. Self-organizing feature maps are used to capture the possible states of student knowledge from an existing test database. The trained network implements a universal student knowledge model that is compatible with knowledge space theory approaches to student assessment and computer aided instruction. The student model can be applied to rapidly assess the knowledge of any given student, and chart a path from lower to higher states of expertise. The authors illustrate the concept on an aircraft fuel management domain, demonstrating its noise-tolerance and insensitivity to feature map parameter values. An approach to determining the correct feature map size is also described