Multimodal Fast–Slow Neural Network for learning engagement evaluation

Purpose Student engagement is a key factor that connects with student achievement and retention. This paper aims to identify individuals' engagement automatically in the classroom with multimodal data for supporting educational research. Design/methodology/approach The video and electroencephalogram data of 36 undergraduates were collected to represent observable and internal information. Since different modal data have different granularity, this study proposed the Fast–Slow Neural Network (FSNN) to detect engagement through both observable and internal information, with an asynchrony structure to preserve the sequence information of data with different granularity. Findings Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can recognize engagement better than the traditional data fusion methods. The results are also analyzed to figure out the reasons for the better performance of the proposed FSNN. Originality/value This study combined multimodal data from observable and internal aspects to improve the accuracy of engagement detection in the classroom. The proposed FSNN used the asynchronous process to deal with the problem of remaining sequential information when facing multimodal data with different granularity.