Towards Actionable Pedagogical Feedback: A Multi-Perspective Analysis of Mathematics Teaching and Tutoring Dialogue

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multi-perspective discourse analysis framework for mathematics classroom dialogues, integrating domain-specific talk moves, dialogue acts, and discourse relations to improve feedback and AI educational tools.

Contribution

It presents a novel top-down analysis approach combining multiple discourse perspectives to better understand and classify classroom utterances in mathematics education datasets.

Findings

Discovered meaningful discourse patterns in teaching and tutoring dialogues.

Highlighted the crucial role of utterances without talk moves in classroom discourse.

Demonstrated the importance of discourse relations and dialogue acts for AI-assisted education.

Abstract

Effective feedback is essential for refining instructional practices in mathematics education, and researchers often turn to advanced natural language processing (NLP) models to analyze classroom dialogues from multiple perspectives. However, utterance-level discourse analysis encounters two primary challenges: (1) multifunctionality, where a single utterance may serve multiple purposes that a single tag cannot capture, and (2) the exclusion of many utterances from domain-specific discourse move classifications, leading to their omission in feedback. To address these challenges, we proposed a multi-perspective discourse analysis that integrates domain-specific talk moves with dialogue act (using the flattened multi-functional SWBD-MASL schema with 43 tags) and discourse relation (applying Segmented Discourse Representation Theory with 16 relations). Our top-down analysis framework enables a comprehensive understanding of utterances that contain talk moves, as well as utterances that do not contain talk moves. This is applied to two mathematics education datasets: TalkMoves (teaching) and SAGA22 (tutoring). Through distributional unigram analysis, sequential talk move analysis, and multi-view deep dive, we discovered meaningful discourse patterns, and revealed the vital role of utterances without talk moves, demonstrating that these utterances, far from being mere fillers, serve crucial functions in guiding, acknowledging, and structuring classroom discourse. These insights underscore the importance of incorporating discourse relations and dialogue acts into AI-assisted education systems to enhance feedback and create more responsive learning environments. Our framework may prove helpful for providing human educator feedback, but also aiding in the development of AI agents that can effectively emulate the roles of both educators and students.