  Seating location in the classroom can affect student engagement, attention
and academic performance by providing better visibility, improved movement, and
participation in discussions. Existing studies typically explore how
traditional seating arrangements (e.g. grouped tables or traditional rows)
influence students' perceived engagement, without considering group seating
behaviours under more flexible seating arrangements. Furthermore, survey-based
measures of student engagement are prone to subjectivity and various response
bias. Therefore, in this research, we investigate how individual and group-wise
classroom seating experiences affect student engagement using wearable
physiological sensors. We conducted a field study at a high school and
collected survey and wearable data from 23 students in 10 courses over four
weeks. We aim to answer the following research questions: 1. How does the
seating proximity between students relate to their perceived learning
engagement? 2. How do students' group seating behaviours relate to their
physiologically-based measures of engagement (i.e. physiological arousal and
physiological synchrony)? Experiment results indicate that the individual and
group-wise classroom seating experience is associated with perceived student
engagement and physiologically-based engagement measured from electrodermal
activity. We also find that students who sit close together are more likely to
have similar learning engagement and tend to have high physiological synchrony.
This research opens up opportunities to explore the implications of flexible
seating arrangements and has great potential to maximize student engagement by
suggesting intelligent seating choices in the future.
