Review on portable EEG technology in educational research

Abstract This study reviewed recently published scientific literature on the use of portable EEG technology (PEEGT) in educational research. After systematically searching online bibliographic databases, 22 relevant papers were located and included in the study. The results indicate that (1) PEEGT was mainly used in seven research topics: reading context, presentation patterns of learning materials, interactive behavior, edutainment, e-learning, motor skill acquisition, and promoting learning performance with PEEGT; (2) PEEGT was mainly used to evaluate attention and meditation of participants; (3) most EEG experiments were endured less than 60 min, the sample sizes of EEG experiments were small, the largest research group was university students, portable EEG devices used in educational research were mainly developed by NeuroSky Inc. and Emotiv Inc., and 45% of the papers depicted the validity of PEEGT by citing previous studies and only 3 papers assessed the validity of PEEGT by experiments. As PEEGT is still at its early developing stage, it encounters with two big challenges: considerable measuring errors, and inconvenience to wear in large-scale samples and long-time. It also has some research limitations: not only lack of studies in naturalistic classrooms settings and sports education, but also lack of studies in investigating all cognitive aspects. PEEGT would be employed extensively in education field in the near future if it can address the challenges mentioned above.

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