Classifying learner behavior from high frequency touchscreen data using recurrent neural networks

Abstract

Sensor stream data, particularly those collected at the millisecond of granularity, have been notoriously difficult to leverage classifiable signal out of. Adding to the challenge is the limited domain knowledge that exists at these biological sensor levels of interaction that prohibits a comprehensive manual feature engineering approach to classification of those streams. In this paper, we attempt to enhance the assessment capability of a touchscreen based ratio tutoring system by using Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to predict the strategy being demonstrated by students from their 60hz data streams. We hypothesize that the ability of neural networks to learn representations automatically, instead of relying on human feature engineering, may benefit this classification task. Our RNN and baseline models were trained and cross-validated at several levels on historical data which had been human coded with the task strategy believed to be exhibited by the learner. Our RNN approach to this historically difficult high frequency data classification task moderately advances performance above baselines and we discuss what implication this level of assessment performance has on enabling greater adaptive supports in the tutoring system.