An Audience Response System for Monitoring Classroom Emotional Climate in Elementary School

Even though the emotional state of a student or the student body in a classroom greatly influences teaching, learning, and motivation, there is a small number of measurements for classroom climate in early education. Significantly, research of human-robot interaction (HRI) would benefit from the information gained from classroom climate analysis. Classroom emotional climate (CEC) comprises the socio-emotional factors of the classroom; student-student interactions and the student's emotional intelligence and mood. In this paper, we propose a novel, cheap and easy-to-implement audience response system device that records students' emotional states in a classroom in an elementary school. The device is developed based on psychological, mechanical, and electronic requirements. The first aim of this study was to investigate the usability of the device in a K-8 classroom for CEC measurement. On the other hand, the second objective was to test students' openness to new educational technologies, and the effect of introducing said technologies on the CEC. The device was tested during two consecutive lectures of foreign language in two fifth-grade English classrooms in primary school. During the lecture, pupils also used educational robots STEMI as an educational tool for one activity. Data collection was done on the devices and using post-questionnaires after both lectures. As a result of the fact that the device was introduced during two different school days, and due to the variability of the participating students and the curriculum for the two days, the analysis was done separately. The analysis was done on data from post-questionnaires and from the device. The questionnaire results and the results from the device show that pupils conform to new educational technologies easily. Activities where students had to write or read, registered the lowest number of presses, since they were concentrating on the assignment. As observed in the questionnaires the activities that were positively evaluated in the questionnaires had the highest number of presses for positive emotions on the device. Similarly the activities that had negative evaluations in the questionnaires had higher number of negative emotion presses than the activities with the positive connotations. Current students in primary schools expect a classroom where interaction is similar to the virtual world they have grown up in, requiring faster information rates and visual learning. Nevertheless, not every type of technology, or the pedagogical aspect of the introduced technology may be suitable to their needs. Teachers that receive feedback about the influence of their lesson plan on the students' emotional states can adjust their instructional and teaching strategies to correspond to the students' states. In other words, the results observed in this pilot study are relevant to educators and researchers as well.