Aligning Tutor Discourse Supporting Rigorous Thinking with Tutee Content Mastery for Predicting Math Achievement

TL;DR

This study examines how tutor discourse and student performance interact to predict math achievement, revealing that combining talk moves encouraging reasoning with ITS mastery improves prediction accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces an interpretable model combining tutor talk moves and student ITS performance to predict math achievement, highlighting the importance of discourse in learning outcomes.

Findings

Combined features yield higher prediction accuracy (AUC 0.77)

Talk moves encouraging reasoning predict high mastery students' achievement

Revoicing student ideas predicts low mastery students' achievement

Abstract

This work investigates how tutoring discourse interacts with students' proximal knowledge to explain and predict students' learning outcomes. Our work is conducted in the context of high-dosage human tutoring where 9th-grade students (N= 1080) attended small group tutorials and individually practiced problems on an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS). We analyzed whether tutors' talk moves and students' performance on the ITS predicted scores on math learning assessments. We trained Random Forest Classifiers (RFCs) to distinguish high and low assessment scores based on tutor talk moves, student's ITS performance metrics, and their combination. A decision tree was extracted from each RFC to yield an interpretable model. We found AUCs of 0.63 for talk moves, 0.66 for ITS, and 0.77 for their combination, suggesting interactivity among the two feature sources. Specifically, the best decision tree emerged from combining the tutor talk moves that encouraged rigorous thinking and students' ITS mastery. In essence, tutor talk that encouraged mathematical reasoning predicted achievement for students who demonstrated high mastery on the ITS, whereas tutors' revoicing of students' mathematical ideas and contributions was predictive for students with low ITS mastery. Implications for practice are discussed.