The sound of inattention: Predicting mind wandering with automatically derived features of instructor speech

Ian Gliser, Caitlin Mills, Nigel Bosch, Shelby Smith, Daniel Smilek, Jeffrey D. Wammes

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

Lecturing in a classroom environment is challenging - instructors are tasked with maintaining students’ attention for extended periods of time while they are speaking. Previous work investigating the influence of speech on attention, however, has not yet been extended to instructor speech in live classroom lectures. In the current study, we automatically extracted acoustic features from live lectures to determine their association with rates of classroom mind-wandering (i.e., lack of student attention). Results indicated that five speech features reliably predicted classroom mind-wandering rates (Harmonics-to-Noise Ratio, Formant 1 Mean, Formant 2 Mean, Formant 3 Mean, and Jitter Standard Deviation). These speaker correlates of mind-wandering may be a foundation for developing a system to provide feedback in real-time for lecturers online and in the classroom. Such a system may prove to be highly beneficial in developing real-time tools to retain student attention, as well as informing other applications outside of the classroom.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationArtificial Intelligence in Education- 21st International Conference, AIED 2020, Proceedings, Part I
EditorsIg Ibert Bittencourt, Mutlu Cukurova, Rose Luckin, Kasia Muldner, Eva Millán
PublisherSpringer
Pages204-215
Number of pages12
ISBN (Print)9783030522360
DOIs
StatePublished - 2020
Externally publishedYes
Event21st International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education, AIED 2020 - Ifrane, Morocco
Duration: Jul 6 2020Jul 10 2020

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume12163 LNAI
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference21st International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education, AIED 2020
Country/TerritoryMorocco
CityIfrane
Period7/6/207/10/20

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020.

Keywords

  • Acoustics
  • Attention
  • Mind-wandering
  • openSMILE
  • Speech

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