Exploring Undergraduate Students’ Psychological Stress in the Mathematics Classroom with Fitness Trackers

ABSTRACT Math anxiety and academic distress, two interrelated forms of psychological stress, are pervasive problems for undergraduate mathematics students. Most of the research in this area has taken a broad view of the impact this stress has on students’ learning across an entire course or, more broadly, the entire curriculum for their degree. To complement this existing body of research, this paper serves a dual purpose: First, to provide insight into undergraduate students’ day-to-day classroom stress, and secondly, to explore fitness trackers as a tool for in situ detection of student anxiety or stress in the classroom. To accomplish the first objective, we conduct a phenomenographic analysis to explore the variation in 29 students’ reported experiences of psychological stress within a session on roots of polynomial functions. We identified 7 categories of description. For the second objective, we recorded the students’ heart rate during the same lesson. We clustered students heart rate variability plots according to our categories of description and employed a logistic regression model to estimate the probability that a student will report experiencing psychological stress given their heart rate variability. Our results show that fitness trackers can produce measures that serve as a predictor of self-reported emotional change.

**摘要** 数学焦虑和学业困扰是两种相互关联的心理压力形式，对于本科数学专业的学生来说是普遍存在的问题。该领域的大多数研究都从广泛的角度探讨了这种压力对学生在整个课程，或者更广泛地说，对其学位的整个课程体系学习的影响。为了补充现有的研究成果，本文有两个目的：首先，深入了解本科生日常课堂压力；其次，探索健身追踪器作为一种在课堂上原位检测学生焦虑或压力的工具。为了实现第一个目标，我们进行了现象图析学分析，以探究29名学生在一节关于多项式函数根的课程中所报告的心理压力体验的差异。我们确定了7种描述类别。对于第二个目标，我们记录了同一堂课中学生的心率。我们根据描述类别对学生的心率变异性图表进行聚类，并采用逻辑回归模型来估计给定学生心率变异性的情况下，其报告经历心理压力的概率。我们的结果表明，健身追踪器能够产生可作为自我报告的情绪变化预测指标的测量值。