Evaluating students engagement in classrooms using agent-based social simulation

Students engagement is a widely recognized concept that influence the achievement of outcome and learning in higher education. Studies have indicated boredom as one sign of a poor engagement in a classroom. For example, students who are bored may apply less effort and stop paying attention to their lecturer over time. Such students ultimately end up getting poor academic results, involving in many disciplinary actions and at risk of dropping out. However, many researchers study the problem of poor engagement in classrooms using traditional methods such as the questionnaire survey and setting up experiments that consume considerable time, effort and with very limited settings. Consequently, in this paper, we present our work-in-progress that addresses the problem. We propose a conceptual emotion-based student engagement model that is animated by an agent-based social simulator. The preliminary theory of this proposal is based on three main elements in a classroom; the engagement level of students, the emotional state of a lecturer and the emotional states of students.