Assessing students' emotional states: An approach to identify lectures that provide an enhanced learning experience

The learning process is affected by various elements in the classroom. An enhanced learning experience can maximize students' positive emotional states, and therefore, students' learning achievements. Thus, identifying lectures that provide a superior learning experience is critical to improving students' attention during classroom activities. In this paper, the authors propose a methodology that quantifies students' emotional states in order to identify lectures that provide enhanced learning experiences. An attitudinal survey considering relevant emotional states in a classroom setting such as engagement, delight, interest, boredom, frustration, and confusion was used to evaluate students' emotions and their intensities. Correlation analysis indicated that positive and negative emotions were strongly positively correlated (r > 0.6) and moderately positively correlated (r > 0.4) among them respectively. Confusion was found to be the emotional state with lowest correlation coefficients. On the other hand, engagement and boredom were strongly negatively related with a correlation coefficient of -0.74. Additionally, perceived teaching style was at least moderately correlated to each one of the students' emotional states. Unexpectedly, perceived teaching style was not correlated to perceived difficulty of the lecture (r = -0.01). Finally, the authors demonstrated that the use of Value Path Graph (VPG) is useful to identify lectures that provide an enhanced learning experience on various dimensions.