A Generalized Apprenticeship Learning Framework for Capturing Evolving Student Pedagogical Strategies

Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) have advanced rapidly in recent years and have been successfully applied to e-learning environments like intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs). Despite great success, the broader application of DRL to educational technologies has been limited due to major challenges such as sample inefficiency and difficulty designing the reward function. In contrast, Apprenticeship Learning (AL) uses a few expert demonstrations to infer the expert’s underlying reward functions and derive decision-making policies that generalize and replicate optimal behavior. In this work, we leverage a generalized AL framework, THEMES, to induce effective pedagogical policies by capturing the complexities of the expert student learning process, where multiple reward functions may dynamically evolve over time. We evaluate the effectiveness of THEMES against six state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating its superior performance and highlighting its potential as a powerful alternative for inducing effective pedagogical policies and show that it can achieve high performance, with an AUC of 0.899 and a Jaccard of 0.653, using only 18 trajectories of a previous semester to predict student pedagogical decisions in a later semester.