May 27, 2019

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May 13-17, 2019

May 6, 2019

Tracking Students’ Emotions and Mindsets

By Benjamin Herold

The race is on to provide students with personalized learning experiences based on their individual emotions, cognitive processes, “mindsets,” and character and personality traits.

Academic researchers, for example, are busy developing computerized tutoring systems that gather information on students’ facial expressions, heart rate, posture, pupil dilation, and more. Those data are then analyzed for signs of student engagement, boredom, or confusion, leading a computer avatar to respond with encouragement, empathy, or maybe a helpful hint. “The idea is that emotions have a powerful influence on cognition,” said Sidney D’ Mello, an assistant professor of computer science and psychology at the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana.

The increasing power and affordability of eye tracking, speech-recognition, and other technologies have made it possible for researchers to investigate those connections more widely and deeply, he said. “Ten years ago, there were things you could do in a lab that you couldn’t do in the messiness of the real world,” D’ Mello said. “Now, you can get a reasonable proxy of a student’s heart rate from a webcam.”

Still, widely available classroom applications of such work might be a decade or more away. More prevalent now are digital resources that seek to measure and support the development and self-identification of such “noncognitive competencies” as self-management, perseverance, and a “growth mindset” that recognizes skills can improve with effort.

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