The Psychological Dynamics of Students in a Classroom: Modeling and Control Strategies Based on Suggestibility Theory

This work is motivated by the observation that students in a classroom sometimes seem to behave not as a group of independent individuals, but instead as a collective body. Interaction among students leads to psychological dynamics within the class, specifically the propagation of attitudes from student to student. These dynamics tend to be unstable. The goal of this paper is to investigate if it is possible to find a mathematical model that captures the crowd dynamics, and if it is then possible to use control systems techniques to stabilize a crowd. Our approach is to use suggestibility theory to derive a discrete-time nonlinear model, then use observer-based output-feedback control and some simple nonlinear control techniques. Snapshots from several simulations are included.