  Knowledge tracing (KT) aims to monitor students' evolving knowledge states
through their learning interactions with concept-related questions, and can be
indirectly evaluated by predicting how students will perform on future
questions. In this paper, we observe that there is a common phenomenon of
answer bias, i.e., a highly unbalanced distribution of correct and incorrect
answers for each question. Existing models tend to memorize the answer bias as
a shortcut for achieving high prediction performance in KT, thereby failing to
fully understand students' knowledge states. To address this issue, we approach
the KT task from a causality perspective. A causal graph of KT is first
established, from which we identify that the impact of answer bias lies in the
direct causal effect of questions on students' responses. A novel
COunterfactual REasoning (CORE) framework for KT is further proposed, which
separately captures the total causal effect and direct causal effect during
training, and mitigates answer bias by subtracting the latter from the former
in testing. The CORE framework is applicable to various existing KT models, and
we implement it based on the prevailing DKT, DKVMN, and AKT models,
respectively. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the
effectiveness of CORE in making the debiased inference for KT. We have released
our code at https://github.com/lucky7-code/CORE.
