Classroom Behavior Monitoring with YOLO An Empirical Study in Higher Education Settings

In classroom teaching, student behavior can reflect their learning state and classroom participation, which is of great significance for teaching quality analysis. To address the problems of dense student targets, numerous small objects, frequent occlusions, and imbalanced class distribution in real classroom scenes, this paper proposes an improved student classroom behavior recognition model named ALC-YOLOv8s based on YOLOv8s. The model introduces SPPF-LSKA to enhance contextual feature extraction, employs CFC-CRB and SFC-G2 to optimize multi-scale feature fusion, and incorporates ATFLoss to improve the learning ability for minority classes and hard samples. Experimental results show that compared with the baseline model, the improved model achieves increases of 1.8% in mAP50 and 2.1% in mAP50-95. Compared with several mainstream detection methods, the proposed model can well meet the requirements of automatic student behavior recognition in complex classroom scenarios.

Student behavior detection is important for intelligent classroom analysis but remains challenging in large-class scenarios due to dense instance co-occurrence, asymmetric occlusion, depth-wise scale variation, and fine-grained semantic degradation in distant targets. Existing classroom behavior datasets and general-purpose detectors are insufficient to characterize and address these challenges. This paper constructs the Highly Congested Classroom Behavior (HCCB) dataset, containing 50,229 student behavior instances across seven categories: reading, writing, heads up, sleeping, looking around, bowing head, and using phone. HCCB provides a challenging benchmark that integrates dense distributions, severe occlusion, scale variation, and fine-grained behavioral semantics. To address these issues, we propose ODER-HSFNet, a YOLO-based detection framework tailored to highly crowded classrooms. At its core, ODER-HSFNet introduces three task-specific innovations: the Occlusion-aware Deformable Edge Rectifier (ODER), which strengthens boundary evidence under occlusion; the Hypergraph-State Spatial Fusion (HSSF) module, which integrates local structure enhancement, state-space contextual modeling, and high-order relation aggregation; and the Occlusion-Calibrated Detection Head (OCDetect), which suppresses low-quality Pre-NMS candidates and reduces false positives from occlusion boundaries and neighboring instances. Experiments on two classroom behavior detection datasets show that ODER-HSFNet outperforms mainstream YOLO-series methods, achieving 60.60%/80.12% mAP50:95/mAP50 on HCCB and 57.36%/74.65% on SCB-D3-S. Ablation studies further verify the effectiveness of the proposed design for highly crowded classroom behavior detection.

Automated classroom engagement recognition holds substantial promise for scalable learning analytics, yet the suitability of modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for this task under zero-shot conditions remains largely unexplored. We present a systematic benchmark that evaluates five widely-used VLMs: CLIP, BLIP-VQA, GPT-4o, LLaVA-1.5-7B, and Qwen2.5VL-7B-Instruct across two complementary educational datasets: DAiSEE, an individual-student video dataset (300 sampled test clips), and the Student Classroom Behaviour dataset (SCB, 1,168 scene-level images). Each model is probed with three prompt variants spanning minimal, rubric-anchored, and chain-of-thought designs. Our experiments reveal three primary failure modes of zero-shot VLMs for engagement recognition: (1) near-random performance on individual students, with Cohen's kappa never exceeding 0.10 on DAiSEE; (2) severe class collapse, where models assign 85-100% of predictions to a single engagement level regardless of visual content; and (3) extreme prompt sensitivity, with accuracy swings of up to 32 percentage points on identical images depending solely on prompt phrasing. Remarkably, scene-level classification on SCB is substantially more tractable: CLIP and GPT-4o achieve kappa approximately 0.60 when prompted with behaviorally-grounded rubrics. We also document a practical barrier for deployment: GPT-4o's safety filters reject 98% of chain-of-thought requests involving individual student faces. Our findings provide a calibrated baseline and surface critical design considerations for the use of VLMs in educational observation systems.