Predicting Specificity in Classroom Discussion

TL;DR

This paper presents new methods and interpretable features for predicting the specificity of classroom discussions, aiming to improve assessment of discussion quality and pedagogical analysis.

Contribution

It introduces novel predictive methods and feature sets that outperform existing approaches in classifying discussion specificity.

Findings

Proposed methods outperform state-of-the-art in specificity prediction

Identified interpretable features for pedagogical analysis

Enhanced understanding of discussion quality indicators

Abstract

High quality classroom discussion is important to student development, enhancing abilities to express claims, reason about other students' claims, and retain information for longer periods of time. Previous small-scale studies have shown that one indicator of classroom discussion quality is specificity. In this paper we tackle the problem of predicting specificity for classroom discussions. We propose several methods and feature sets capable of outperforming the state of the art in specificity prediction. Additionally, we provide a set of meaningful, interpretable features that can be used to analyze classroom discussions at a pedagogical level.