Assessing Students' Interests in a Lecture using Speech-driven Body Movement Entrainment

Abstract

In face-to-face communication, it is often observed that the body movements of a listener change almost simultaneously with changes in voice patterns of the speaker. This is referred to as 'entrainment'. The present study examined the relationship between the degree of teacher-student entrainment and students' interest in the lecture. Four university professors gave 60-minute lectures. The body movements of the students were recorded using a video camera located in the front of the lecture room and the voices of the professors were recorded using a microphone. After each lecture, the students were asked to rate their interest in the topic of the lecture. We used a computer-based video analysis to measure the intensity of students' body movements, and examined the temporal relationship between body movements and the intensity of the teacher's voice, by a moving correlation analysis. These coefficients can be regarded as the entrainment levels. In all lectures, there were positive and significant relationships between the level of entrainment and students' interest. These results indicate that temporal changes in the level of entrainment can be used as an indicator of temporal changes in the interest level of students.