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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