Cost-Effective, Actionable Engagement Detection at Scale.
Ryan S. Baker, Jaclyn L. Ocumpaugh · 2014
Costs of educational measures and interventions have important real-world implications, made more pertinent when used at scale. Traditional measures of engagement (e.g., video and field observations) scale linearly, so that expanding from 10 classrooms to 100 can incur 10 times the cost. By contrast, the cost of applying an automated sensor-free detector of student engagement is independent of the size of the data set. While the development and validation of such detectors requires an initial investment, once this cost is amortized across large data sets, the cost per student/hour is quite modest. In addition, these detectors can be reused each year at minimal additional cost. In this paper, we provide a formal cost analysis of automated detectors of engagement for ASSISTments.