The detection and recognition of student behavior play a pivotal role in the context of smart classrooms. However, conventional methods often encounter performance degradation due to challenges such as occlusion, data diversity, and complexity. To effectively addresses these issues, we propose a method that integrates YOLOv5 with coordinate attention mechanism and GhostConv for analyzing students' behavior. Specifically, the coordinate attention module enhances the localization ability of the proposed method by addressing problems related to target scale variations and uneven distribution. Additionally, we employ GhostConv to replace conventional convolutional layers in YOLOv5, reducing parameters while improving computational efficiency. To verify the validity of our method, a self-built challenging dataset for real teaching scenarios and Citypersons dataset are selected for the experiment. In comparison to the original YOLOv5, our method has achieved a 14.8% and 5.7% increase in mean average precision rates, with a 19.0% improvement in frames per second.