Exploring the Relationship Between Individual Learners' Physiological Arousal and Learning Outcomes in Collaborative Learning*

Inspired by existing theoretical and empirical research on physiological arousal and learning, this study originally come up with a method to profile learners' physiological arousal with heart rate. Further, this study explored the relationship between individual learners' physiological arousal and their learning outcomes in collaborative learning. Towards that end, this study conducted a collaborative activity and developed a heart rate analysis platform to automatically detect individual learners' physiological arousal during collaborative learning. Fifty-six undergraduates involved in the activity. Their individual learning outcomes from collaborative activity were obtained by comparing the second and first individual argument diagrams. Participants' physiological arousal frequency during collaborative learning were automatically collected through the heart rate analysis platform. Spearman's analysis indicated a negative correlation between individual learners' physiological arousal and their learning outcomes in collaborative learning. This preliminary finding suggests that, unlike individual learning, physiological arousal is not necessarily a valid predictor of learning performance in complex and highly interactive collaborative learning setting.