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The paper develops datasets and methods to assess student participation in real-life collaborative learning environments. In collaborative learning environments, students are organized into small groups where they are free to interact within their group. Thus, students can move around freely causing issues with strong pose variation, move out and re-enter the camera scene, or face away from the camera. We formulate the problem of assessing student participation into two subproblems: (i) student group detection against strong background interference from other groups, and (ii) dynamic participant tracking within the group. A massive independent testing dataset of 12,518,250 student label instances, of total duration of 21 hours and 22 minutes of real-life videos, is used for evaluating the performance of our proposed method for student group detection. The proposed method of using multiple image representations is shown to perform equally or better than YOLO on all video instances. Over the entire dataset, the proposed method achieved an F1 score of 0.85 compared to 0.80 for YOLO. Following student group detection, the paper presents the development of a dynamic participant tracking system for assessing student group participation through long video sessions. The proposed dynamic participant tracking system is shown to perform exceptionally well, missing a student in just one out of 35 testing videos. In comparison, a stateof- the-art method fails to track students in 14 out of the 35 testing videos. The proposed method achieves 82.3% accuracy on an independent set of long, real-life collaborative videos. 

We introduce a new method to detect student group interactions in collaborative learning videos. We consider the following video activities: (i) human to human, (ii) human to others, and (iii) lack of any interaction. The system uses multidimensional AM-FM methods to detect student faces, hair, and then use the results to detect possible interactions. We use dynamic graphs to represent group interactions within each video.We tested our methods with 15 videos and achieved an 84% accuracy for students facing the camera and 76% for students facing both towards and away from the camera.