Resources for:
  • Current Students
  • Faculty & Staff
  • Alumni
  • Directory
  • News
  • Events
UCI School of Education
  • About Us
    • Dean's Welcome
    • Our Mission & Vision
    • Facts & Information
    • Climate Council
    • Maps & Directions
  • Academics
    • Ph.D. in Education
    • MAT + Credential
    • Undergraduate
  • Community Engagement
    • Overview
    • Teacher Academy >
      • California Reading & Literature Project
      • UCI CalTeach
      • UCI History Project
      • UCI Math Project
      • UCI Science Project
      • UCI Writing Project
    • Orange County Educational Advancement Network
    • Center for Educational Partnerships >
      • SAGE Scholars Program
      • COSMOS
      • California Alliance for Minority Participation
    • Center for Research on Teacher Development and Professional Practice
  • Faculty
    • Our Faculty
    • Faculty Interviews
    • Centers
    • publications
  • Giving

New publication: "Where's the Reward? A Review of Reinforcement Learning for Instructional Sequencing"

12/12/2019

 
Assistant Professor of Education Shayan Doroudi has published with colleagues Vincent Aleven and Emma Brunskill in the International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education: "Where's the Reward? A Review of Reinforcement Learning for Instructional Sequencing."

Doroudi studies earning analytics, learning sciences, educational technology, and educational data science. His research interests center on the foundations of learning about learning and how they relate to the design of socio-technical systems that improve learning.

​Abstract

Since the 1960s, researchers have been trying to optimize the sequencing of instructional activities using the tools of reinforcement learning (RL) and sequential decision making under uncertainty. Many researchers have realized that reinforcement learning provides a natural framework for optimal instructional sequencing given a particular model of student learning, and excitement towards this area of research is as alive now as it was over fifty years ago. But does RL actually help students learn? If so, when and where might we expect it to be most helpful? 
Picture
To help answer these questions, we review the variety of attempts to use RL for instructional sequencing. First, we present a historical narrative of this research area. We identify three waves of research, which gives us a sense of the various communities of researchers that have been interested in this problem and where the field is going. Second, we review all of the empirical research that has compared RL-induced instructional policies to baseline methods of sequencing. We find that over half of the studies found that RL-induced policies significantly outperform baselines. Moreover, we identify five clusters of studies with different characteristics and varying levels of success in using RL to help students learn. We find that reinforcement learning has been most successful in cases where it has been constrained with ideas and theories from cognitive psychology and the learning sciences. However, given that our theories and models are limited, we also find that it has been useful to complement this approach with running more robust offline analyses that do not rely heavily on the assumptions of one particular model. Given that many researchers are turning to deep reinforcement learning and big data to tackle instructional sequencing, we believe keeping these best practices in mind can help guide the way to the reward in using RL for instructional sequencing.

Comments are closed.
Quick Links:

Fall 2022 Magazine
​Faculty & Research
Faculty Interviews
Directory
Admissions
​Giving
​News Center
Employment
Programs:
​
PhD in Education
MAT
Major in Edu Science
Minor in Edu Studies
CalTeach
CASE
Resources for:
​

​Current Students​
Faculty & Staff
University of California, Irvine
School of Education
401 E. Peltason Drive
Suite 3200
Irvine, CA  92617
(949) 824-8073

Picture
© ​2022 UC Regents 
  • About Us
    • Dean's Welcome
    • Our Mission & Vision
    • Facts & Information
    • Climate Council
    • Maps & Directions
  • Academics
    • Ph.D. in Education
    • MAT + Credential
    • Undergraduate
  • Community Engagement
    • Overview
    • Teacher Academy >
      • California Reading & Literature Project
      • UCI CalTeach
      • UCI History Project
      • UCI Math Project
      • UCI Science Project
      • UCI Writing Project
    • Orange County Educational Advancement Network
    • Center for Educational Partnerships >
      • SAGE Scholars Program
      • COSMOS
      • California Alliance for Minority Participation
    • Center for Research on Teacher Development and Professional Practice
  • Faculty
    • Our Faculty
    • Faculty Interviews
    • Centers
    • publications
  • Giving
  • Resources For:
  • Future Students
  • Current Students
  • Faculty & Staff

  • Search This Site
  • Directory
  • News
  • Events