Detecting student frustration based on handwriting behavior

Detecting states of frustration among students engaged in learning activities is critical to the success of teaching assistance tools. We examine the relationship between a student's pen activity and his/her state of frustration while solving handwritten problems. Based on a user study involving mathematics problems, we found that our detection method was able to detect student frustration with a precision of 87% and a recall of 90%. We also identified several particularly discriminative features, including writing stroke number, erased stroke number, pen activity time, and air stroke speed.