Tracing Mathematical Proficiency Through Problem-Solving Processes

Jungyang Park, Suho Kang, Jaewoo Park, Jae Hong Kim, Jaewoo Shin, Seonjoon Park, Youngjae Yu


Abstract
Knowledge Tracing (KT) aims to model student’s knowledge state and predict future performance to enable personalized learning in Intelligent Tutoring Systems. However, traditional KT methods face fundamental limitations in explainability, as they rely solely on the response correctness, neglecting the rich information embedded in students’ problem-solving processes. To address this gap, we propose Knowledge Tracing Leveraging Problem-Solving Process (KT-PSP), which incorporates students’ problem-solving processes to capture the multidimensional aspects of mathematical proficiency. We also introduce KT-PSP-25, a new dataset specifically designed for KT-PSP. Building on this, we present StatusKT, a KT framework that employs a teacher-student-teacher three-stage LLM pipeline to extract students’ Mathematical Proficiency (MP) as intermediate representation. In this pipeline, the teacher LLM first extracts problem-specific proficiency indicators, then a student LLM generates responses based on the student’s solution process, and a teacher LLM evaluates these responses to determine mastery of each indicator. The experimental results on KT-PSP-25 demonstrate that StatusKT improves the prediction performance of existing KT methods. Moreover, StatusKT provides interpretable explanations for its predictions by explicitly modeling students’ mathematical proficiency. Code is available here.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-acl.961
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
19251–19269
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.961/
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Cite (ACL):
Jungyang Park, Suho Kang, Jaewoo Park, Jae Hong Kim, Jaewoo Shin, Seonjoon Park, and Youngjae Yu. 2026. Tracing Mathematical Proficiency Through Problem-Solving Processes. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 19251–19269, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Tracing Mathematical Proficiency Through Problem-Solving Processes (Park et al., Findings 2026)
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