Individual and Group-wise Classroom Seating Experience: Effects on Student Engagement in Different Courses

TL;DR

This study investigates how individual and group seating arrangements in classrooms influence student engagement, using wearable sensors and surveys, revealing that proximity and group seating behaviors significantly impact engagement levels.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining physiological sensors and surveys to analyze seating effects on engagement, focusing on group behaviors under flexible seating arrangements.

Findings

Proximity correlates with higher perceived engagement.

Close seating leads to increased physiological synchrony.

Flexible seating can enhance student engagement.

Abstract

Seating location in the classroom can affect student engagement, attention and academic performance by providing better visibility, improved movement, and participation in discussions. Existing studies typically explore how traditional seating arrangements (e.g. grouped tables or traditional rows) influence students' perceived engagement, without considering group seating behaviours under more flexible seating arrangements. Furthermore, survey-based measures of student engagement are prone to subjectivity and various response bias. Therefore, in this research, we investigate how individual and group-wise classroom seating experiences affect student engagement using wearable physiological sensors. We conducted a field study at a high school and collected survey and wearable data from 23 students in 10 courses over four weeks. We aim to answer the following research questions: 1. How does the seating proximity between students relate to their perceived learning engagement? 2. How do students' group seating behaviours relate to their physiologically-based measures of engagement (i.e. physiological arousal and physiological synchrony)? Experiment results indicate that the individual and group-wise classroom seating experience is associated with perceived student engagement and physiologically-based engagement measured from electrodermal activity. We also find that students who sit close together are more likely to have similar learning engagement and tend to have high physiological synchrony. This research opens up opportunities to explore the implications of flexible seating arrangements and has great potential to maximize student engagement by suggesting intelligent seating choices in the future.