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Response process data collected from human–computer interactive items contain detailed information about respondents' behavioural patterns and cognitive processes. Such data are valuable sources for analysing respondents' problem‐solving strategies. However, the irregular data format and the complex structure make standard statistical tools difficult to apply. This article develops a computationally efficient method for exploratory analysis of such process data. The new approach segments a lengthy individual process into a sequence of short subprocesses to achieve complexity reduction, easy clustering and meaningful interpretation. Each subprocess is considered a subtask. The segmentation is based on sequential action predictability using a parsimonious predictive model combined with the Shannon entropy. Simulation studies are conducted to assess the performance of the new method. We use a case study of PIAAC 2012 to demonstrate how exploratory analysis for process data can be carried out with the new approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computer simulations have become a popular tool for assessing complex skills such as problem‐solving. Log files of computer‐based items record the human–computer interactive processes for each respondent in full. The response processes are very diverse, noisy, and of non‐standard formats. Few generic methods have been developed to exploit the information contained in process data. In this paper we propose a method to extract latent variables from process data. The method utilizes a sequence‐to‐sequence autoencoder to compress response processes into standard numerical vectors. It does not require prior knowledge of the specific items and human–computer interaction patterns. The proposed method is applied to both simulated and real process data to demonstrate that the resulting latent variables extract useful information from the response processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personalized learning refers to instruction in which the pace of learning and the instructional approach are optimized for the needs of each learner. With the latest advances in information technology and data science, personalized learning is becoming possible for anyone with a personal computer, supported by a data‐driven recommendation system that automatically schedules the learning sequence. The engine of such a recommendation system is a recommendation strategy that, based on data from other learners and the performance of the current learner, recommends suitable learning materials to optimize certain learning outcomes. A powerful engine achieves a balance between making the best possible recommendations based on the current knowledge and exploring new learning trajectories that may potentially pay off. Building such an engine is a challenging task. We formulate this problem within the Markov decision framework and propose a reinforcement learning approach to solving the problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]