Towards the exploitation of multimodal data to measure students’ mental effort

In this paper, we rely on the Cognitive Load Theory and explore how multimodal data can be used to measure students’ effort at the task level. Different from what we expected, the subjective effort ratings have a higher correlation with the students’ scores, while the behavioral and physiological data have higher correlations with the scores than with the effort ratings. Moreover, we found that, in the context of our study, ability had a stronger influence on students’ success than the prior knowledge, while none of these variables had an influence on the effort ratings. Finally, we propose a new effort model based on students’ activity.