Hearts and Minds
Interdisciplinary approaches and biosensors can help measure student engagement.
By Idalis Villanueva, Brett Campbell, Adam Raikes, Suzanne Jones, and LeAnn Putney
As engineering educators, we recognize the importance of—and need for—incorporating theories into instructional practice. But how do we measure what is occurring in the classroom in a way that can inform near-term adjustments?
Traditionally, metrics based on survey, performance, and observation data are used to understand students’ experiences in the classroom. While valuable, these data sources must be collected over long periods, during which more contextual information on the “how” and “now” are lost. Without a more holistic understanding of classroom experiences as engineering students take part in them, we risk losing valuable information that can shape future pedagogical and motivational approaches for engineering education.
Our study sought to explore how multimodal and interdisciplinary approaches might provide such real-time insights by examining an engineering design classroom across a semester. We used a combination of online surveys on emotions and electrodermal activity (EDA) wrist sensors across five engineering design workshops. Eighteen students out of a participant pool of 58 students in an engineering course agreed to wear a noninvasive EDA sensor that recorded their biometric skin conductance during class. The EDA data were sampled at 4Hz (taken every quarter second), providing a deeper look into student engagement in the classroom. When paired with a topic emotions survey, these biometric data were used to identify potential correlations between reported and physical responses—akin to a lie detector for engagement.
Findings from the semester’s first challenge suggest that in introducing design topics, for example around generating ideas to solve an engineering problem, negative emotions such as anger had a significant inverse correlation to EDA. The effect was minimized as students progressed through each class and across the semester. This points to the importance of considering classroom strategies that will help students manage any negative emotions they may experience when facing a new class or topic. Furthermore, our data indicate that student-led activities generate higher engagement than those led by the instructor. Together, these findings point to the need to understand the real-time effects of teaching pedagogies and strategies in helping students emotionally and mentally cope with complex topics such as those found in engineering.
We recommend that engineering educators begin to think of ways to facilitate more real-time engagement in their classrooms with purposeful motivational outcomes. Based on our work, reducing the role of anticipatory responses due to other factors (e.g., uncertainty, newness to a topic) can help students engage more with the course topics. Specifically, educators can do more to explain the rationale behind design topics, explicitly state the motivation for course topics, and clarify any expectations for engaging in student-led individual and collective activities.
Moreover, it will be important for engineering educators to understand the effectiveness of their preferred choice of instruction (e.g., lecture, active learning) for engaging students in a course topic. For this, educators can pre-assess students’ preferred activity types early and throughout the semester to inform classroom strategies to achieve intended learning outcomes. Further research may demonstrate how different educational contexts and course topics in engineering can influence students’ engagement.
Idalis Villanueva is an assistant professor of engineering education and adjunct professor of biological engineering at Utah State University. Brett Campbell is an associate professor of psychology at Brigham Young University. Adam Raikes is a postdoctoral research associate at Arizona State University’s College of Medicine. Suzanne Jones is an associate professor in the department of teacher education and leadership at Utah State University. LeAnn Putney is professor and chair of the department of educational psychology and higher education at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. This article is excerpted from “A Multi-Modal Exploration of Engineering Students’ Emotions and Electrodermal Activity in Design Activities” from the July 2018 Journal of Engineering Education.