Use of Galvanic Skin Responses, Salivary Biomarkers, and Self-reports to Assess Undergraduate Student Performance During a Laboratory Exam Activity

Summary

Research on undergraduate students' academic achievement emotions have primarily relied on self-reports in laboratory settings. Studies rarely include bio-physiological measures to these self-reports. This protocol will describe a methodology that integrates self-reports with and bio-physiological measures to assess student response and performance during a laboratory examination activity.

Abstract

Typically, self-reports are used in educational research to assess student response and performance to a classroom activity. Yet, addition of biological and physiological measures such as salivary biomarkers and galvanic skin responses are rarely included, limiting the wealth of information that can be obtained to better understand student performance. A laboratory protocol to study undergraduate students' responses to classroom events (e.g., exams) is presented. Participants were asked to complete a representative exam for their degree. Before and after the laboratory exam session, students completed an academic achievement emotions self-report and an interview that paralleled these questions when participants wore a galvanic skin sensor and salivary biomarkers were collected. Data collected from the three methods resulted in greater depth of information about students' performance when compared to the self-report. The work can expand educational research capabilities through more comprehensive methods for obtaining nearer to real-time student responses to an examination activity.

Introduction

In the area of academic achievement emotions, studies indicate that understanding of students' motivations could predict students' performance, achievement, and career plans¹. Students' abilities to 'emotionally respond' to challenging course tasks² are pivotal to students' professional development. Yet, nearer to real-time responses related to academic achievement emotions are under-explored^3-6. This paper presents a protocol to study ways to explore nearer real-time responses from students (e.g., physiological responses) when presented with representative classroom situations (e.g., test taki....

Protocol

Procedures have been approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at Utah State University for studies on human subjects. Care should be taken that IRB procedures are approved by the host institution and considerations regarding the protection of human subjects should take place prior, during, and after performance of any aspect of this protocol. As per IRB regulations, involvement of external parties or companies in the data collection and analysis processes must follow proper protocols to de-identify participant information and protect the confidential nature of the data.

1. Selection of Participants and Activities to Test

Results

This section illustrates representative examples of results that can be obtained from each measure, including the self-report. The intent of the figures is to present the utility of adding measures such as salivary biomarkers (Figure 1) and galvanic skin responses (Figure 2) to self-reports (Figure 3) in order to gain a greater spectrum of information from a classroom event (e.g., exams). For triangulation of self-reports with a .......

Discussion

This protocol describes the integration of self-report surveys and inquiries, salivary biomarkers, and galvanic skin responses to study individual differences in classroom activities during a laboratory session. This protocol has many advantages for researchers seeking to identify academic achievement emotions, emotional regulation, and affective responses to different activities in an instructional setting, especially during assessment periods (e.g., exams). Whereas traditionally, self-reports and academic grad.......

Materials

List of materials used in this article

Name	Company	Catalog Number	Comments
Salivary Kit	ZRT Laboratories	Female/Male Saliva Profile I	An account needs to be created with the company before sending samples; diurnal samples are recommended for this protocol
Galvanic Skin Response Wrist Sensor and Band	Empatica, Inc.	E3P.v4	M/L fits for the majority of the population although you may need to purchase a smaller size for thin wrists
E-Prime Software	Psychology Software Tools	E-Prime 2.0 Professional	Consider time stamping separately from software