Towards better affect detectors

Abstract

The well-studied Baker et al., affect detectors on boredom, frustration, confusion and engagement concentration with ASSISTments dataset were used to predict state tests scores, college enrollment, and even whether a student majored in a STEM field. In this paper, we present three attempts to improve upon current affect detectors. The first attempt analyzed the effect of missing skill tags in the dataset to the accuracy of the affect detectors. The results show a small improvement after correctly tagging the missing skill values. The second attempt added four features related to student classes for feature selection. The third attempt added two features that described information about student common wrong answers for feature selection. Result showed that two out of the four detectors were improved by adding the new features.