AI-Based Emotion Recognition in Education: Progress, Applications, and Open Challenges

AI-based emotion recognition has emerged as a critical component of affect-aware educational technologies, particularly in online, large-scale, and technology-mediated learning environments where direct observation of learners’ emotional states is limited. By leveraging facial expressions, speech, physiological signals, and interaction data, emotion-aware systems aim to support adaptive instruction, learner engagement, and instructional decision-making. Despite rapid technical progress, the integration of emotion recognition into authentic educational practice remains constrained by dataset limitations, cultural bias, weak pedagogical alignment, and unresolved ethical concerns. This article presents a critical and theory-informed review of recent advances in AI-based emotion recognition in education, with particular emphasis on deep learning architectures and multimodal fusion approaches, while highlighting persistent challenges and future research directions.Purpose:This study aims to critically examine the current state of AI-based emotion recognition in educational contexts by analyzing dominant modeling paradigms, sensing modalities, application domains, and ethical implications, in order to identify key gaps between technical development and pedagogical practice.Methods/Study design/approach:The study adopts a narrative literature review approach grounded in educational and affective computing theories. Representative and influential studies were analyzed across facial, speech, physiological, and multimodal emotion recognition systems, with emphasis on deep learning, attention-based, and transformer architectures. The review synthesizes findings related to system performance, educational applications, dataset characteristics, and ethical considerations.Result/Findings:The findings indicate that multimodal emotion recognition systems generally outperform unimodal approaches in detecting learning-relevant affective states such as engagement, frustration, and confusion. Advances in deep learning, particularly attention-based and transformer models, improve temporal modeling and robustness. However, most systems rely on non-educational datasets, demonstrate limited cultural generalizability, and prioritize recognition accuracy over pedagogical interpretability and long-term educational impact. Ethical challenges related to privacy, consent, bias, and emotional surveillance remain insufficiently addressed.Novelty/Originality/Value:This study provides an integrative and pedagogically grounded synthesis that bridges affective computing research with educational theory and governance perspectives. By reframing AI-based emotion recognition as a decision-support mechanism rather than an automated control system, the article offers a conceptual foundation for responsible, culturally inclusive, and ethically aligned deployment of emotion-aware AI in education, serving as a reference for future interdisciplinary research and policy development.