Applying functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) in educational research: a systematic review.

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) has been applied in educational studies during the past decade, arousing tremendous attention, but lack of a systematic review, which prompted this paper to fill the gap. A systematic search with snowball approach identified 99 peer-reviewed journal papers for in-depth content analysis. The findings revealed that considerable attention was devoted to cognitive domain, while a discernible void was observed in the affective domain, accounting for a mere 10.1% of articles. Most participants were aged between 7 and 11 years old, while the adolescents were not sufficiently investigated. Most studies on infants investigated the temporal region, which showed the great potential of fNIRS exploring language function in the younger age group. More wearable or wireless fNIRS devices applied in education suggested its practicability of cognitive evaluation in physical education and skilled training. Finally, this paper proposed potential prospects for future trends adopting fNIRS in education research (e.g., learning science in real educational context, facilitating brain science in early education, learning analytics based on multi-modal data fusion). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]