Multimodal Assessment of Teaching Behavior in Immersive Rehearsal Environment-TeachLivE

Nonverbal behaviors such as facial expressions, eye contact, gestures, and body movements in general have strong impacts on the process of communicative interactions. Gestures play an important role in interpersonal communication in the classroom between student and teacher. To assist teachers with exhibiting open and positive nonverbal signals in their actual classroom, we have designed a multimodal teaching application with provisions for real-time feedback in coordination with our TeachLivE test-bed environment and its reflective application; ReflectLivE. Individuals walk into this virtual environment and interact with five virtual students shown on a large screen display. The recent research study is designed to have two settings (7-minute long each). In each of the settings, the participants are provided lesson plans from which they teach. All the participants are asked to take part in both settings, with half receiving automated real-time feedback about their body poses in the first session (group 1) and the other half receiving such feedback in the second session (group 2). Feedback is in the form of a visual indication each time the participant exhibits a closed stance. To create this automated feedback application, a closed posture corpus was collected and trained based on the existing TeachLivE teaching records. After each session, the participants take a post-questionnaire about their experience. We hypothesize that visual feedback improves positive body gestures for both groups during the feedback session, and that, for group 2, this persists into their second unaided session but, for group 1, improvements occur only during the second session.