The Effect of Acute Stress on the Performance of Students in Engineering Education

Abstract

In the presents paper, we summarize the results of a recent study on the relationship between task-caused acute stress and students' performance. Our experimental protocol was based on the CLAS dataset, which contains physiological signals of 60 students. The physiological recordings were captured during students' involvement in five different tasks, including three interactive tasks (Stroop test, Math test, IQ test) and two noninteractive tasks. The non-interactive tasks aimed at emotion elicitation via blocks of sixteen photographs and sixteen emotional music video clips, purposely selected to cover the entire arousal-valence space. We observed that the three Stroop, Math and IQ tests cause higher acute stress levels than pictures and musical stimuli purposely selected to provoke emotional reactions. The experimental results show that acute stress has different effects on students' academic performance, depending on their gender and individually. Specifically, in contrast to the females, males were observed to show lower stress levels in the Math test. At the same time, males were observed to be less concentrated on the Stoop test. We observed that heart-rate variability (HRV) could be used as an indicator of the students' performance under stress as it is not related to students' abilities.