Detecting Student Engagement: Human Versus Machine

Abstract

Engagement is complex and multifaceted, but crucial to learning. Computerized learning environments can provide a superior learning experience for students by automatically detecting student engagement (and, thus also disengagement) and adapting to it. This paper describes results from several previous studies that utilized facial features to automatically detect student engagement, and proposes new methods to expand and improve results. Videos of students will be annotated by third-party observers as mind wandering (disengaged) or not mind wandering (engaged). Automatic detectors will also be trained to classify the same videos based on students' facial features, and compared to the machine predictions. These detectors will then be improved by engineering features to capture facial expressions noted by observers and more heavily weighting training instances that were exceptionally-well classified by observers. Finally, implications of previous results and proposed work are discussed.