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Project

A Cognitive Interface for Educational Improvement: Assessing Students’ Attentional Focus in the Classroom

WorkgroupMultimodal Interaction Lab
Duration07/2017-open
FundingLeibniz-WissenschaftsCampus Cognitive Interfaces, IWM budget resources
Project description

Students’ focused attention is a central prerequisite for classroom learning. Research shows that teachers differ substantially in how successful they are in eliciting and guiding their students’ attention, which is often referred to as “classroom management” and “cognitive activation”. Furthermore, they may also not always be aware of their students’ attentional focus, and this may be particularly true for beginning teachers (teachers who are in the induction phase or shortly after this stage).

This project aims to develop an assistive “cognitive interface” which assesses students’ focused attentional state. Such an interface could be used (1) as part of teacher education (e.g. video feedback sessions that also include aggregated information on the attentional focus of the class or “stand-alone” solutions that provide feedback on patterns of student engagement over the course of the teaching unit), and (2) in research projects that bring together classroom situations/teaching approaches with students' attentional focus and the resulting learning outcomes.

A team of researchers who specialize in attentional and working-memory processes in learning situations (Gerjets), computational attention registration (Kasneci) and teaching quality (Trautwein) is brought together. During the project, a cognitive interface for teacher-led learning arrangements will be developed. The resulting interface will be validated in both the TüDiLab by collecting additional measures on students’ attentional focus and real classroom environments. These findings not only reveal the effects of cognitive interface when it is used in real classroom, but also provide a basis to understand the relation between students’ attentional focus and their learning of the topics.

Cooperations


Publications
  • Sümer. Ö., Goldberg, P., D’Mello, S., Gerjets, P., Trautwein, U., & Kasneci, E.  (in press). Multimodal engagement analysis from facial videos in the classroom. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing.
  • Sümer, Ö., Gerjets, P., Trautwein, U., Kasneci, E. (2020). Attention Flow: End-to-End Joint Attention Estimation. The IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 3327-3336.
  • Sümer, Ö., Gerjets, P., Trautwein, U., Kasneci, E. (2020). Automated Anonymisation of Visual and Audio Data in Classroom Studies. AAAI Workshops. https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.05080
  • Goldberg, P., Sümer, Ö., Stürmer, K., Wagner, W., Göllner, R., Gerjets, P., Kasneci, E., & Trautwein, U. (2019). Attentive or Not? Toward a Machine-Learning Approach for Assessing Students’ Visible Engagement in Classroom Instruction. Educational Psychology Review. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-019-09514-z  
  • Sümer, Ö., Goldberg, P., Stürmer, K., Seidel, T., Gerjets, P., Trautwein, U., Kasneci, E. (2018). Teachers' Perception in the Classroom. The IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2315-2324.

Conference Contributions
  • Goldberg, P., Sümer, Ö., Stürmer, K., Göllner R., Wagner, W., Gerjets, P., Kasneci, E. & Trautwein, U. (2019, Februar). Aufmerksam oder nicht? Die kontinuierliche Erfassung von beobachtbarem Aufmerksamkeits-Verhalten in Instruktionssituationen. Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Empirische Bildungsforschung (GEBF). Köln, Deutschland [Poster]
  • Sümer, Ö., Goldberg, P., Gerjets, P., Trautwein, U., Kasneci, E. (2019, February). Engagement Estimation in the Classroom. Theory and Practice in Machine Learning and Computer Vision (ICERM). Providence, USA. [Poster]        
  • Sümer, Ö., Goldberg, P., Stürmer, K., Seidel, T., Gerjets, P., Trautwein, U., & Kasneci, E. (2018, Juni). Workshop on Teachers’ Perception in the Classroom. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR). Salt Lake City, USA. [Talk]       
  • Goldberg, P., Stürmer, K., Göllner R., Wagner, W., Sümer, Ö., Gerjets, P., Kasneci, E.   Trautwein, U. (2018, Oktober). Aufmerksamkeitsprozesse von Lernenden in Unterrichtssituationen. LEAD Tag der Wissenschaft. Tübingen. [Talk]          
 
 

contact

Prof. Dr. Peter Gerjets Prof. Dr. Peter Gerjets
Tel.: +49 7071 979-219