An unobtrusive and multimodal approach for behavioral engagement detection of students

In this paper, we investigate detection of students’ behavioral engagement states (On-Task vs. Off-Task) in authentic classroom settings. We propose a multimodal detection approach, based on three unobtrusive modalities readily available in a 1:1 learning scenario where learning technologies are incorporated. These modalities are: (1)Appearance: upper-body video captured using a camera; (2) Context-Performance: students’ interaction and performance data related to learning content; and (3) Mouse: data related to mouse movements during learning process. For each modality, separate unimodal classifiers were trained, and decision-level fusion was applied to obtain final behavioral engagement states. We also analyzed each modality based on Instructional and Assessment sections separately (i.e., Instructional where a student is reading an article or watching an instructional video vs. Assessment where a student is solving exercises on the digital learning platform). We carried out various experiments on a dataset collected in an authentic classroom, where students used laptops equipped with cameras and they consumed learning content for Math on a digital learning platform. The dataset included multimodal data of 17 students who attended a Math course for 13 sessions (40 minutes each). The results indicate that it is beneficial to have separate classification pipelines for Instructional and Assessment sections: For Instructional, using only Appearance modality yields an F1-measure of 0.74, compared to fused performance of 0.70. For Assessment, fusing all three modalities (F1-measure of 0.89) provide a prominent improvement over the best performing unimodality (i.e., 0.81 for Appearance).