Applications of the Elo rating system in adaptive educational systems

The Elo rating system was originally developed for rating chess players, nowadays it is widely used for ranking players of many other games. The system can be used in educational systems when we interpret student's answer to an item as a match between the student and the item. In this way we can easily dynamically estimate the skill of students and difficulty of items. We provide a systematic overview of different variants of the Elo rating system and their application in education. We compare the Elo rating system to alternative methods and describe a specific case study (an adaptive practice of geography facts) to illustrate the application of the Elo rating system in education. We argue that the Elo rating system is simple, robust, and effective and thus suitable for use in the development of adaptive educational systems. We provide specific guidelines for such applications.