Use of electrodermal wristbands to measure students' cognitive engagement in the classroom

A pilot project was conducted to study the feasibility of using electrodermal activity sensors embedded in a watch-like device to measure skin conductivity in real time. In the field of education, it may be interesting to use this technology to assess the students' cognitive engagement in the classroom. A few volunteer students as well as the professor were wearing an Empatica E4 wristband during some class periods where different activities were organized such as lectures, workshops and exams. Monitoring several individuals simultaneously makes possible to compare the collected data among students and between the students and the professor. Also, since the activities were weekly repeated, it was possible to assess to which extent the observed patterns were similar from one group to the other. In brief, the collected data is very difficult to interpret, since some external factors seem to have a significant effect on the measurements. Indeed, discrepancies are observed in the data curves representing the students’ electrodermal activity. Also, the data generated by the professor is quite different from one group to the other, even if he repeated the exact same activities at two different times of the week. It is suggested to improve the understanding of all the phenomena that could affect the electrodermal activity measurements before trying to draw conclusions related to the students’ cognitive engagement in the classroom.

Uncontrolled Keywords

• Cognitive engagement
• Electrodermal activity
• Empatica E4 wristband
• Engineering education