Retain: building a concept recommendation system that leverages spaced repetition to improve retention in educational settings

There is a glaring lack of focus on long-term retention in today's educational paradigms. Moreover, research in the area of learning, memory, and specifically, promoting long-term retention has produced several robust and experimentally validated principles. A lot of this work can be leveraged to place some much-needed emphasis on long-term retention in educational settings. One such principle is spaced repetition -- a technique that has been empirically proven to promote long-term retention. The applications of current spaced repetition algorithms are limited to atomic concepts -- concepts that don't have any conceptual dependencies. In order to apply current spaced repetition formulae to more general contexts, we need to develop a system that can take conceptual dependencies into account. In this paper, we propose a framework called Retain that does exactly this. Retain is a system that can be used in virtually any educational context -- not just contexts that solely involve atomic concepts (i.e. learning vocabulary terms). It is a concept recommendation system that provides students with suggestions about when to review various concepts based on their understanding of parent concepts and the principle of spaced repetition. The results produced by Retain as well as the rules upon which Retain was built were evaluated by a group of teachers and were overwhelmingly favored over other concept recommendation baselines.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2017

Author dc:creator

• Subrahmanyam, Shilpa

Contributors dc:contributor

• Zhai, ChengXiang

• Spaced repetition
• Education
• Concept recommendation system

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2017 by Shilpa Subrahmanyam

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/97490

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F97490