Learning to Estimate Slide Comprehension in Classrooms with Support Vector Machines

Comprehension assessment is an essential tool in classroom learning. However, the judgment often relies on experience of an instructor who makes observation of students´ behavior during the lessons. We argue that students should report their own comprehension explicitly in a classroom. With students´ comprehension made available at the slide level, we apply a machine learning technique to classify presentation slides according to comprehension levels. Our experimental result suggests that presentation-based features are as predictive as bag-of-words feature vector which is proved successful in text classification tasks. Our analysis on presentation-based features reveals possible causes of poor lecture comprehension.