Abstract
Mental task solving is accompanied by physiological responses. These are not only indicative of a stressful situation, but are supposedly related to cognitive load as well. The present pilot study assessed the feasibility of establishing the relationship between chosen physiological parameters and the difficulty of science-related tasks assessed by school children. Five 12-year olds and five 14-year olds were asked to solve age-appropriate scientific problems and appraise their difficulty. Meanwhile, their heart rate, heart rate variability, respiration rate, electrodermal activity and skin temperature were monitored. Physiological data were able to explain a considerable proportion of difficulty variance. By considering linear regression models, the best features of each of these parameters were determined. The best predictive power was achieved by simple features, such as mean skin temperature, maximum values and standard deviations of heart and respiration rates, and the number of skin conductance responses. Of these, skin conductance explained the largest proportion of variance. It was found that the task duration is a good predictor of its difficulty, however, it only partly diminishes the predictive power of physiological variables.
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Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge that the study was part of the project, Explaining Effective and Efficient Problem Solving of the Triplet Relationship in Science Concepts Representations (J5-6814), which was financially supported by the Slovenian Research Agency.
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
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Lukan, J., Geršak, G. (2021). Predicting Task Difficulty Through Psychophysiology. In: Devetak, I., Glažar, S.A. (eds) Applying Bio-Measurements Methodologies in Science Education Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71535-9_3
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