Impact of inquiry interventions on students in e-learning and classroom environments using affective computing framework

Effective teaching strategies improve the students’ learning rate within academic learning time. Inquiry-based instruction is one of the effective teaching strategies used in the classrooms. But these teaching strategies are not adapted in other learning environments like intelligent tutoring systems, including auto tutors. In this paper, we propose an automatic inquiry-based instruction teaching strategy, i.e., inquiry intervention using students’ affective states. The proposed model contains two modules: the first module consists of the proposed framework for predicting the unobtrusive multi-modal students’ affective states (teacher-centric attentive and in-attentive states) using the facial expressions, hand gestures and body postures. The second module consists of the proposed automated inquiry-based instruction teaching strategy to compare the learning outcomes with and without inquiry intervention using affective state transitions for both an individual and a group of students. The proposed system is tested on four different learning environments, namely: e-learning, flipped classroom, classroom and webinar environments. Unobtrusive recognition of students’ affective states is performed using deep learning architectures. After student-independent tenfold cross-validation, we obtained the students’ affective state classification accuracy of 77% and object localization accuracy of 81% using students’ faces, hand gestures and body postures. The overall experimental results demonstrate that there is a positive correlation with r = 0.74 between students’ affective states and their performance. Proposed inquiry intervention improved the students’ performance as there is a decrease of 65%, 43%, 43%, and 53% in overall in-attentive affective state instances using the inquiry interventions in e-learning, flipped classroom, classroom and webinar environments, respectively.