Engageme: Assessing Student Engagement In Online Learning Environment Using Neuropsychological Tests

In the proposed research, we investigated whether the standardized neuropsychological tests commonly used to assess attention can be used to measure students’ engagement in online learning settings. Accordingly, we employed 73 students in three clinically relevant neuropsychological tests to assess three types of attention. Students’ engagement performance, as evidenced by their facial video, was also annotated by three independent annotators. The manual annotations observed a high level of inter-annotator reliability (Krippendorffs’ Alpha of 0.864). Further, by obtaining a correlation value of 0.673 (Spearmans’ Rank Correlation) between manual annotation and neuropsychological tests score, our results show construct validity to prove neuropsychological test scores’ significance as a latent variable for measuring students’ engagement. Finally, using non-intrusive behavioral cues, including facial action unit and eye gaze data collected via webcam, we propose a machine learning method for engagement analysis in online learning settings, achieving a low mean squared error value (0.022). The findings suggest a neuropsychological test-based machine learning technique could effectively assess students’ engagement in online education. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.