Affect-driven Learning Outcomes Prediction in Intelligent Tutoring Systems

Equipping an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) with the ability to interpret affective signals from students could potentially improve the learning experience of students by enabling the tutor to monitor the students’ progress and provide timely interventions as well as present appropriate affective reactions via a virtual tutor. Most ITSs equipped with affect modeling capabilities attempt to predict the emotional state of users. However, the focus in this work is instead on trying to directly predict the learning outcomes of students from a stream of video capturing the students faces as they work on a set of math problems. Using facial features extracted from a video stream, we train classifiers to directly predict the success or failure of a student’s attempt to answer a question while the student has just begun to work on the problem. In this work, we first introduce a novel dataset of student interactions with MathSpring, a popular ITS. We provide an exploratory analysis of the different problem outcome classes using typical facial action unit activations. We develop baseline models to predict the problem outcome labels of students solving math problems and discuss how early problem outcome labels can be forecasted and utilized to provide possible interventions.