Dynamic Student Profiles

Different learners have different characteristics, needs, and preferences. They differ, for example, in their learning goals, their knowledge about the domain, their cognitive traits, and their learning styles. Furthermore, learning takes place in different situations and contexts. For example, a learner might learn at home in a quiet environment or on the bus while going to school or university. Individual differences as well as differences in the situation and context of learning can affect the learning process and can make learning either easy or difficult for a particular person in a particular situation.

As David Jonassen and Barbara Grabowski pointed out, many studies showed that considering individual differences can help students to learn more effectively. Furthermore, the consideration of context and situation has shown to lead to many benefits for learners such as more hands-on and authentic learning experiences. Adaptive learning systems focus on exactly this issue by aiming at considering individual differences and providing learners with courses, materials, recommendations, and feedback that fit their individual characteristics and situations. However, in order to do so, such systems need to have information about a learner’s individual characteristics and situation. The process of getting this information is called student profiling.

In this process, different types of data, such as student behavior data, student performance data, or survey data, are utilized and information such as students’ knowledge, learning styles, or cognitive traits is inferred. The identified information is then typically stored in a student profile. As such, the student profile is a crucial component of every adaptive learning system, enabling the system to access information about the learner and his situation, as well as provide a learner with suitable adaptivity based on this information. A student profile that is updated frequently is called a dynamic student profile. This entry discusses terminology used when discussing student profiles and explains the types of student profiles. It then details the information used in dynamic student profiles and describes how they are updated.