Classquake: Measuring Students' Attentiveness in the Classroom

Many studies report a decline of student attentiveness during lectures. Reasons for such declines of attentiveness are increasing fatigue and decreasing concentration having strong influence on the effectiveness of lectures and students' retention. In such situations, it is recommended to change the teaching method or to interrupt the lecture by short breaks. For the lecturer, however, it is difficult to predict and recognize a decline of attention while teaching. Measurements of attentiveness are either based on physiological measures or observational measures. Both are neither reliable nor practical for lecture hall settings. To address this problem, we propose a system called Classquake that uses students' smartphones as decentralized sensors to measure their activity and attentiveness during lectures.