Personalized exercise recommendation method based on causal deep learning: Experiments and implications

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated innovations for supporting learning and teaching online. However, online learning also means a reduction of opportunities in direct communication between teachers and students. Given the inevitable diversity in learning progress and achievements for individual online learners, it is difficult for teachers to give personalized guidance to a large number of students. The personalized guidance may cover many aspects, including recommending tailored exercises to a specific student according to the student's knowledge gaps on a subject. In this paper, we propose a personalized exercise recommendation method named causal deep learning (CDL) based on the combination of causal inference and deep learning. Deep learning is used to train and generate initial feature representations for the students and the exercises, and intervention algorithms based on causal inference are then applied to further tune these feature representations. Afterwards, deep learning is again used to predict individual students' score ratings on exercises, from which the Top-N ranked exercises are recommended to similar students who likely need enhancing of skills and understanding of the subject areas indicated by the chosen exercises. Experiments of CDL and four baseline methods on two real-world datasets demonstrate that CDL is superior to the existing methods in terms of capturing students' knowledge gaps in learning and more accurately recommending appropriate exercises to individual students to help bridge their knowledge gaps. © 2022 The Author(s).