Measuring Student Engagement in Introductory Engineering STEM Classes

This project aims to automate the quantification of students’ engagement in early engineering course work, using non-invasive, non-intrusive and non-stigmatizing means. Engagement is captured in terms of three strands: a) Emotional engagement describes the students’ feelings about learning, the learning environment, the teachers, and their classmates.

Operationalization of emotional engagement includes expressing interest, enjoyment, and excitement, all of which can be captured and interpreted from facial expressions. b) Behavioral engagement reflects internal attention and focus, and can be operationalized by body movement, hand gestures and eye movement. c) Cognitive engagement describes the extent to which the student is mentally processing the information, making connections with prior learning, and actively seeking to make sense of the key instructional ideas. This project expands on the research of an IUSE Level 1 funding which created a prototype of a biometric sensor network (BSN) that captures and interprets levels of behavioral and emotional engagement.

This IUSE Level 2 project plans to make the BSN portable and scalable to various class sizes and settings, to explore novel machine learning (ML) methods for further quantifying students’ engagement and extend the automated quantification of engagement to include cognitive engagement. Proposed validation of the extension to include cognitive engagement to be operationalized by incorporating cognitive probes seamlessly into the lectures.

These probes are scheduled to be designed to align with the cognitive hierarchy captured by the Interactive, Constructive, Active, and Passive (ICAP) framework, and student responses to the probes should permit these responses to serve as independent external cognitive engagement validation against which the automation algorithms’ interpretations can be compared. The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students.

Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.