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Inter-brain coupling analysis reveals learning-related attention of primary school students

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Abstract

Learning-related attention is one of the most important factors influencing learning. Although technologies have enabled the automatic detection of students’ attention levels, previous studies mainly focused on colleges or high schools, lacking further validations in primary school students. More importantly, the detected attention might fail to be learning-related if students did not attend learning tasks in the first place, which is common in real-world learning. This phenomenon poses challenges to the practical application of automatic attention detection, especially at the primary school stage, which is crucial for students to develop learning attitudes/strategies. Inspired by the emerging inter-person perspective in neuroscience, we proposed an inter-brain attention coupling method to detect learning-related attention as an extension to the existing single-person-based method. To test this method, wearable electroencephalogram devices were used to monitor students’ attention levels in a primary school classroom. We found that one’s inter-brain attention coupling, defined as the degree to which an individual student’s attention dynamics match the attention dynamics averaged across other classmates, was positively correlated with academic performance: higher performances are associated with higher coupling to the class-average attention dynamics. Moreover, the attention detection framework based on the inter-person perspective outperforms as an indicator of academic performance compared with the widely-used attention level within an individual. The results provide practical insights by extending the applications of detected attention levels from an inter-person perspective and demonstrating its feasibility in monitoring learning-related attention among primary school students.

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Data will be available upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Ms. Dan Zhang for her valuable help in the data collection and data curation. We would like to thank Bingshuo Qu, Wei Meng, Peng Zhang, Qiang Mao, and Xiaodong Gao for their assistant in the data collection. We would like to thank Huashuo Liu for her support in the visualization. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61977041 and 62107025), and Tsinghua University Spring Breeze Fund (2021Z99CFY037).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, School of Social Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Jingjing Chen & Dan Zhang

  2. Beijing CUSoft Co., Ltd., Beijing, China

    Bing Xu

  3. Tsinghua Laboratory of Brain and Intelligence, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Jingjing Chen & Dan Zhang

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  1. Jingjing Chen
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  2. Bing Xu
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Contributions

JC: Conceptualization, Methodology, Visualization, Writing—original draft preparation. XB: Methodology, Data collection, Data curation. DZ: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Writing—Reviewing and Editing.

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Correspondence to Dan Zhang.

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Competing interests

B. Xu has a financial interest in Beijing CUSoft Co., Ltd.,.The other authors declare no competing financial interests.

Ethical approval

The present study involved a group of primary students (28 students, 16 males) from the same grade-3 class (thirty-five students in total), whose data were recorded, de-identified, and included in the following analysis.The present study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. The protocol (THU201708) was approved by the ethics committee of the Department of Psychology, Tsinghua University. Participants, as well as their legal guardians, gave their written informed consent before joining the experiment.

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Chen, J., Xu, B. & Zhang, D. Inter-brain coupling analysis reveals learning-related attention of primary school students. Education Tech Research Dev 72, 541–555 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-023-10311-3

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