Discussion Tracker: Supporting Teacher Learning about Students' Collaborative Argumentation in High School Classrooms

TL;DR

Discussion Tracker is a classroom analytics tool that helps teachers understand and improve students' collaborative argumentation skills through novel classification algorithms, showing promising teacher feedback and classifier performance.

Contribution

The paper introduces a new discussion analytics system with algorithms for classifying argument moves, specificity, and collaboration in high school classrooms.

Findings

Teachers found the analytics useful

Classifiers achieved moderate to substantial agreement with humans

System supports teacher learning about student argumentation

Abstract

Teaching collaborative argumentation is an advanced skill that many K-12 teachers struggle to develop. To address this, we have developed Discussion Tracker, a classroom discussion analytics system based on novel algorithms for classifying argument moves, specificity, and collaboration. Results from a classroom deployment indicate that teachers found the analytics useful, and that the underlying classifiers perform with moderate to substantial agreement with humans.