cs.HCMay 2, 2026

EduGage: Methods and Dataset for Sensor-Based Momentary Assessment of Engagement in Self-Guided Video Learning

Authors: Zikang Leng, Edan Eyal, Yingtian Shi, Jiaman He, Yaqi Liu, Thomas Plötz

Organizations: School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA · College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA · School of Computing Technologies, RMIT University, Australia

Abstract

Engagement, which links to attentional, emotional, and cognitive dimensions, plays an important role in learning. In online and video-based learning environments, learners often need to regulate their own interactions with instructional materials. Measuring and reflecting on engagement can therefore support both learners and adaptive learning systems. In this study, we use wearable and camera-based sensing devices to collect physiological and motion signals, including PPG, ECG, EDA, EEG, IMU, heart rate, temperature, and eye-tracking data, to estimate learner engagement. We conducted a user study with 16 participants in a video-based learning scenario, where participants completed learning tasks and provided repeated in-situ self-reports of engagement through brief probes. We develop and evaluate a system for engagement estimation, compare different sensing modalities, and further analyze the feasibility and effectiveness of multimodal modeling for characterizing learner engagement. Across participant-based cross-validation, our model achieves an MAE of 0.81, 83.75% within-1 accuracy, 73.93% binary accuracy, and 68.45% binary Macro-F1, outperforming sensor-free, statistical, deep temporal, foundation-model, and LLM-based baselines. Our results suggest that fine-grained engagement estimation is feasible but inherently noisy, and that practical systems should prioritize lightweight combinations of behavioral and physiological signals over full multimodal instrumentation. We release the EduGage dataset, including synchronized multimodal sensor signals, probe-aligned momentary engagement labels, video metadata, quizzes, and study materials, to support reproducible research on fine-grained sensor-based engagement modeling in self-guided learning.

Explore similar work

Aug 7, 2026cs.AI

SetEasy: A Multi-Modal Classroom Engagement Assessment and Seating Optimization Framework

SetEasy optimizes classroom engagement in fixed seating grids. It fuses multimodal sensing (wristband physiology, 4K video, environmental data) and trains a v-Gage model grounded in a revised ISEQ. Each week, two-week engagement forecasts are mapped to a student-seat utility matrix, and CP-SAT generates seating plans under visual-access and social-dynamics constraints. In a four-week deployment (23 students, 331 classes), v-Gage converged across affective, behavioral, cognitive, and overall dimensions, cutting RMSE from 0.75 to 0.53. Optimization raised mean engagement from 0.30 to 0.70, with over two-thirds of seats reaching high engagement and back-row low-activity patterns markedly reduced. These results show that, without hardware changes, interpretable, data-driven seating strategies can substantially enhance engagement. The multimodal "assessment + optimization" paradigm offers a transferable, sustainable path to culturally responsive, differentiated spatial design amid global homogenization.
Zhihao Xie, Hongye Yang, Shien Liu
Jul 2, 2026cs.LG

Single-Channel EEG-Based Cognitive Load Assessment in Online Learning: A Hybrid Deep Learning Approach

Monitoring cognitive load during online learning could help instructors identify content that learners find difficult, but remote settings remove the visual cues that support this judgement in a classroom. We study whether a single-channel, consumer-grade EEG device (the NeuroSky MindWave Mobile 2) can distinguish easy from difficult educational-video content, using the publicly available dataset of Wang et al. [24] (ten learners, one excluded for excessive noise, leaving nine). We implement a hybrid CNN+LSTM+Attention model that combines the raw waveform with band-power features. In a within-subject setting, the model reaches up to 78.5% accuracy, compared with 55% for conventional feature-based classifiers; regularization (dropout and L2) closes the large gap between training and validation accuracy that we observe without it, keeping validation accuracy stable at roughly 68-73%. We are deliberately cautious about these numbers: with only nine subjects, within-subject evaluation is optimistic, and we argue that subject-independent evaluation -- in which no learner appears in both training and test data -- should be the standard for this task. To that end we release a reproducible evaluation pipeline. We frame the work as a feasibility study rather than a deployable system, and pair it with an open, notebook-based tool that records EEG, runs inference, and visualizes estimated cognitive load as a heatmap over the video timeline to help educators locate potentially challenging segments.
Rowan Hussein, Mohamed Ouf
Apr 20, 2026cs.CV

Leveraging Vision-Language Models to Detect Attention in Educational Videos

Educational videos are a cornerstone of remote and blended learning. However, learners' fluctuating attention remains a significant barrier to effective information retention. Prior research has attempted to mitigate this by detecting and reacting to attention loss at runtime using eye tracking. Such detection has been based so far on classical machine learning classifiers trained on engineered features, such as summary statistics over learners' fixations and saccades. These methods have struggled to capture the complex, temporal nature of learner engagement, thus exhibiting moderate prediction performance. In this study, we aim to advance the detection of attention by shifting from standard engineered features to a multimodal foundation models. Using an educational eye-tracking dataset (N = 70), we investigate a novel methodology that utilizes a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to analyze video content directly with superimposed gaze data. This approach aims to leverage the semantic reasoning capabilities of foundation models to contextualize learner focus within the video stream. We evaluate the performance of this VLM-based approach using several prompting strategies with Gemini 3, but ultimately found that none of them could outperform statistical baselines. Our results provide new insights into the limitations of using VLMs for real-time educational diagnostics.
Gabriel Becquet, Sébastien Lallé, Vanda Luengo +1