Assessing student attentional engagement from brain activity during STEM instruction

当老师在课堂上或网上讲授新材料时，学生们真的在听吗？这个项目的雄心勃勃的目标是使用脑电(EEG)客观地测量学生在学习过程中的注意力投入。具体地说，它测量学生在观看在线教育视频时的大脑活动，然后将他们的神经活动与他们在测试和测验等传统学习指标上的表现进行比较。如果成功，这个项目将开发一种工具，可以在神经层面评估学生的注意力投入，并预测学习表现。为大脑成像提供具体和实际的教育应用是重要的，因为它可以用来告知教学方法和教学材料的有效性，或者在个别学生无法参与材料时进行实时干预。在教师和学生往往不会立即相互互动的在线教育背景下，这样的工具可能特别重要。教育视频材料将重点放在自然科学和数学上，目的是改善STEM教育。该项目由EHR核心研究(ECR)计划资助，该计划资助寻求理解、构建理论以解释并提出干预措施(和创新)的基础研究，以解决STEM兴趣、教育、学习和参与方面的持续挑战。它是由社会科学、行为学和经济学理事会的感知、行动和认知项目共同资助的。有效的学习需要关注教学材料。通过测量大脑信号的注意力，可以评估教学的效果和个别学生的表现。了解学生是否以及何时未能吸引注意力，对于设计更好的教学材料或帮助学生个人是至关重要的。这个项目的基本假设是，有效的教学材料会在专心的学生中产生类似的脑电反应。研究人员在STEM教育视频中测试了这一假设，以确定学习是否真的可以预测。参与者包括纽约城市学院理科和工程学院的约180名本科生。在教育方面，参与者还包括来自纽约市四所不同高中的30名高三学生。学生对教育视频反应的相似性将被衡量为脑电活动的受试者间相关性(ISC)。该项目有三个具体目标：(1)使用教学视频验证ISC；(2)测试ISC与传统学习结果测量之间的联系；以及(3)开发一个移动应用程序，帮助将ISC测量从实验室转移到课堂环境。

When a teacher is presenting new material during class or online, are students actually paying attention? The ambitious goal of this project is to objectively measure students' attentional engagement during learning using electroencephalography (EEG). Specifically, it measures students' brain activity as they watch online educational videos, and then compares their neural activity to how well they perform on traditional measures of learning such as tests and quizzes. If successful, this project will develop a tool that can assess student attentional engagement at the neural level and predict learning performance. Providing a concrete and practical educational application for brain imaging is important because it can be used to inform the effectiveness of teaching approaches and instructional materials, or intervene in real-time when individual students fail to engage with the material. Such a tool may be particularly important in the context of online education where teachers and students often do not immediately interact with one another. The educational video material will focus on natural sciences and math with the goal of improving STEM education. The project is funded by the EHR Core Research (ECR) program which funds basic research that seeks to understand, build theory to explain, and suggest interventions (and innovations) to address persistent challenges in STEM interest, education, learning, and participation. It is co-funded by the Perception, Action, and Cognition program in the Social, Behavioral, and Economics Sciences Directorate. Effective learning requires attention to the instructional material. By measuring attention from brain signals, both the efficacy of instruction and the performance of individual students may be assessed. Knowing whether and when students fail to engage attention is crucial for designing better instructional materials or to assist students on an individual basis. The basic hypothesis of this project is that effective instructional materials will generate similar EEG responses across attentive students. The investigators test this hypothesis for STEM educational videos to determine if learning can indeed be predicted. Participants include ~180 undergraduates enrolled in City College of New York's Division of Science and School of Engineering. Educationally, participants also include 30 high school seniors from four diverse New York City high schools. Similarity among students' responses to educational video will be measured as inter-subject correlation (ISC) of EEG activity. The project has three specific aims: (1) Validate ISC using instructional videos; (2) Test the link between ISC and traditional learning outcome measures; and (3) Develop a mobile application to help transfer ISC measures from the laboratory to the classroom setting.