ABSTRACT
Understanding the behavior of learners within learning
applications and analyzing the factors that may influence the
learning process play a key role in designing and optimizing
learning applications. In this work we focus on a specific
application named “1x1 trainer” that has been designed for
primary school children to learn one digit multiplications. We
investigate the database of learners’ answers to the asked
questions (N > 440000) by applying the Markov chains. We want
to understand whether the learners’ answers to the already asked
questions can affect the way they will answer the subsequent
asked questions and if so, to what extent. Through our analysis we
first identify the most difficult and easiest multiplications for the
target learners by observing the probabilities of the different
answer types. Next we try to identify influential structures in the
history of learners’ answers considering the Markov chain of
different orders. The results are used to identify pupils who have
difficulties with multiplications very soon (after couple of steps)
and to optimize the way questions are asked for each pupil
individually.