Mathematical Modeling of Knowledge Transfer between Students and Mentors to Estimate Ideal Quantities of Mentors for Student Populations Using Optimal Control Theory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A shortage of educators has always been a concern across all educational institutes in the US. In education, the main goal is to progress students adequately and evenly; however, it is inevitable for some to fall behind. To combat this, upwards of 30% of students graciously volunteer their time as mentors. This population is limited; therefore, it is crucial to optimize the mentor assignments maximizing students benefited and minimizing mentors employed. In this project, a compartmental model of differential equations was used to describe the interactions between students and mentors. The compartments of a Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Recovered (SEIR) model are modified to describe the positive propagation of knowledge. As a result, the Amendable-Learning-Informed-Unlearned (ALIUM) model describes the spread of information, where instead of an Infected category, the Informed compartment holds the population of students that were exposed to information through other students, students in the process of learning, and mentors each with unique transmission rates (β1, β 2, β3). The M variable is used to keep track of the percentage of Informed students that are required as mentors. To optimize the M variable, Optimal Control Theory is carried out using Pontryagin’s Maximum Principle and the Forward-Backward Sweep Algorithm with the aim to minimize the number of tutors necessary and maximize the informed population. Preliminary results show that, with a nonlinear control, 30% of the Informed population must be employed as tutors. Mentors’ high employment rate is needed during the first quarter of the whole learning period, before gradually declining to 0% of the Informed population by the time learning is finished. Future research hopes to explore heterogeneous learning speeds for students. Also, a further step is to shape the model according to real world data using Physics Informed Neural Networks (PINNs). This work aligns with UN Sustainability Goal #4: Quality Education.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".