ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Assessment, Testing and Applied Measurement
From Heartbeat to Data – Using Wearable Fitness Trackers as an Affordable Approach to Assess Teachers' Stress
Provisionally accepted
- 1Institut für Bildungswissenschaften, Universitat Leipzig Erziehungswissenschaftliche Fakultat, Leipzig, Germany
- 2Department Health and Prevention, Universitat Greifswald Institut fur Psychologie, Greifswald, Germany
- 3Leuphana Universitat Luneburg, Lüneburg, Germany
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Abstract Past research on physiological indicators of teacher stress often had to rely on expensive and obtrusive assessment methods. Modern fitness trackers represent a non-invasive and convenient alternative. This study investigated the use of wrist-worn fitness trackers to assess teachers' heart rate (HR) as an indicator of stress during teaching. In a laboratory study, we used a Fitbit® fitness tracker to assess teachers' HR before, during, and after a potentially stressful micro-teaching unit. Our results demonstrated that the fitness tracker was useful for mapping teachers' stress, with the data showing how teachers' HR increased before, peaked during, and progressively decreased after the micro-teaching unit. Moreover, we related the fitness tracker data to retrospective teacher self-reports. We found that teachers' subjective stress appraisals and their teaching experience explained only small amounts of variance in HR data. We discuss the potential of fitness trackers as an affordable and ubiquitous assessment tool for research on teacher stress in the classroom and provide advice for practical implementation.
Keywords: Teacher stress, fitness tracker, Heart Rate, Classroom disruptions, Wearable Technology, physiological stress measurement
Received: 18 Jul 2025; Accepted: 30 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Klatt, Lotz, Keßler, Kachel and Deiglmayr. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Mandy Klatt
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