A temporal estimation of students´ on-task mental effort and its effect on students´ performance during computer based testing

Students´ on-task mental effort is an important factor of their achievement behavior. Most studies in literature adopt self-reported methods for effort estimation. In this paper we present and evaluate a method for estimating students´ on-task mental effort during testing, based ontemporal, user-generated trace data. Our goal is to construct a metric that unobtrusively and seamlessly measures students´ on-task mental effort. Additionally, we use this metric in order to investigate the effect of effort expenditure on students´ performance during low-stakes computer based testing procedures. For that reason, we examined on-task mental effort - as defined here - with Temporal Learning Analytics. We present the results from an evaluation case study with 259 undergraduate participant students for the Computers II course. The results are encouraging, since the proposed factor significantly improves the general prediction of students´ performance.