
Learning Sciences Speaker Series
The Learning Sciences Speaker Series invites nationally recognized scholars to Boston University’s Charles River Campus to discuss contemporary research that spans topics in Educational Psychology, Cognitive Science, Human Computer Interaction, Sociology, Applied Linguistics, and Human Development. The Series is organized by the Center for Teaching & Learning in collaboration with the Office of the Associate Provost for Digital Learning & Innovation.
Thursday, February 20th, 2020 – “Automatic Multi-Modal Perception of Students and Classrooms”, Jacob Whitehill
Machine learning offers powerful new ways of analyzing video of school classrooms that are difficult or impractical to implement with human coding. Extracted data can provide fine-grained feedback to teachers, measure the outcome of an educational intervention, or facilitate automated instruction by an AI agent.
This talk will present three projects:
- estimating student engagement with computer vision;
- exploring the relationship between thermal comfort and learning; and
- analyzing positive and negative climate, as defined by the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), using multi-modal machine learning.
Finally, the talk will discuss privacy issues as well as a methodological danger of using automatic classifiers for educational measurement.