Professor Ivon Arroyo Receives $749,983 NSF Grant

Ivon M. Arroyo, Assistant Professor of Social Science & Policy Studies, was awarded a four-year, $749,983 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for her project entitled "INT: Collaborative Research: Detecting, Predicting and Remediating Student Affect and Grit Using Computer Vision."

Under this grant, Dr. Arroyo’s team will automatically measure and predict student persistence, self-efficacy, and state of grit as middle school children use the MathSpring.org mathematics Intelligent Tutoring System in public schools, created in collaboration between WPI and UMASS Amherst. Dr. Arroyo and team will explore whether students' grit (sustained initiative and interest) can be improved and whether it is dependent on emotions recently experienced. This research introduces a new genre of learning technologies called SMARTTutors, which use advanced computer vision techniques to view students’ gaze, hand gestures, head, and face to increase the “bandwidth” of viewing students and automatically detecting their affect.