Statistically Modeling Individual Students’ Learning Over Successive Collaborative Practice Opportunities

Within educational data mining, many statistical models capture the learning of students working individually. However, not much work has been done to extend these statistical models of individual learning to a collaborative setting, despite the effectiveness of collaborative learning activities. We extend a widely used model (the additive factors model) to account for the effect of collaboration on individual learning, including having the help of a partner and getting to observe/help a partner. We find evidence that models that include these collaborative features have a better fit than the original models for performance data and that learning rates estimated using the extended models provide insights into how collaboration benefits individual students’ learning outcomes.