Schedule of Events | Symposia

Postdoctorial Fellowship Award Winner

A school-based neuroscience study on student engagement with intelligent tutoring systems

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 3:00 – 5:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Yushuang Liu¹ (yushuang.liu@bc.edu), Ido Davidesco¹, Bruce McLaren², J Elizabeth Richey³, Xiaorui Xue¹, Leah Teffera², Hayden Stec², Joyce Zhang⁴, Elana Golumbic⁵; ¹Boston College, ²Carnegie Mellon University, ³University of Pittsburgh, ⁴University of Pennsylvania, ⁵Bar-Ilan University

Computer-based intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) are increasingly becoming an integrated component of both in-person and online learning. Even though ITSs are inherently interactive, not all students engage effectively with these platforms. Student engagement with ITSs is typically assessed using behavioral markers (e.g., how long it takes students to solve a problem), which do not completely capture the multidimensional nature of engagement. Therefore, in the current project, we studied how students engage with intelligent tutors using a combination of behavioral, EEG, and eye-tracking measures. A total of 56 high school students participated in the study at a neuroscience lab, which was set up in two high schools. The study adopted a pretest-intervention-posttest design. During the intervention, students watched short instructional videos and solved a series of chemistry problems with the help of a computerized tutor. Students were able to request hints and received feedback from the tutor. In addition to logging student responses, we operationalized engagement as EEG power in the Alpha band (8-12 Hz) and as fixation duration in pre-defined regions of interest (ROIs). Overall, students demonstrated significant pre-to-post test improvement. Preliminary EEG results suggest that students showed lower alpha power during problem solving compared to instructional videos, suggesting that students were more engaged while interacting with the tutor. Preliminary eye-tracking analysis showed that students had longer fixation duration when reading hints compared to other ROIs, suggesting that hints provided by the tutor effectively captured student attention. These preliminary results highlight the potential value of neuroscience methods in educational research.

Topic Area: ATTENTION: Other