Peter Gerjets

Ruikun Hou, Tim Fütterer, Babette Bühler et al.

Classroom observation protocols standardize the assessment of teaching effectiveness and facilitate comprehension of classroom interactions. Whereas these protocols offer teachers specific feedback on their teaching practices, the manual coding by human raters is resource-intensive and often unreliable. This has sparked interest in developing AI-driven, cost-effective methods for automating such holistic coding. Our work explores a multimodal approach to automatically estimating encouragement and warmth in classrooms, a key component of the Global Teaching Insights (GTI) study's observation protocol. To this end, we employed facial and speech emotion recognition with sentiment analysis to extract interpretable features from video, audio, and transcript data. The prediction task involved both classification and regression methods. Additionally, in light of recent large language models' remarkable text annotation capabilities, we evaluated ChatGPT's zero-shot performance on this scoring task based on transcripts. We demonstrated our approach on the GTI dataset, comprising 367 16-minute video segments from 92 authentic lesson recordings. The inferences of GPT-4 and the best-trained model yielded correlations of r = .341 and r = .441 with human ratings, respectively. Combining estimates from both models through averaging, an ensemble approach achieved a correlation of r = .513, comparable to human inter-rater reliability. Our model explanation analysis indicated that text sentiment features were the primary contributors to the trained model's decisions. Moreover, GPT-4 could deliver logical and concrete reasoning as potential teacher guidelines. Our findings provide insights into using advanced, multimodal techniques for automated classroom observation, aiming to foster teacher training through frequent and valuable feedback.

Ivo Bueno, Ruikun Hou, Babette Bühler et al.

Observation of classroom interactions can provide concrete feedback to teachers, but current methods rely on manual annotation, which is resource-intensive and hard to scale. This work explores AI-driven analysis of classroom recordings, focusing on multimodal instructional activity and discourse recognition as a foundation for actionable feedback. Using a densely annotated dataset of 164 hours of video and 68 lesson transcripts, we design parallel, modality-specific pipelines. For video, we evaluate zero-shot multimodal LLMs, fine-tuned vision-language models, and self-supervised video transformers on 24 activity labels. For transcripts, we fine-tune a transformer-based classifier with contextualized inputs and compare it against prompting-based LLMs on 19 discourse labels. To handle class imbalance and multi-label complexity, we apply per-label thresholding, context windows, and imbalance-aware loss functions. The results show that fine-tuned models consistently outperform prompting-based approaches, achieving macro-F1 scores of 0.577 for video and 0.460 for transcripts. These results demonstrate the feasibility of automated classroom analysis and establish a foundation for scalable teacher feedback systems.

Ömer Sümer, Patricia Goldberg, Sidney D'Mello et al.

Student engagement is a key construct for learning and teaching. While most of the literature explored the student engagement analysis on computer-based settings, this paper extends that focus to classroom instruction. To best examine student visual engagement in the classroom, we conducted a study utilizing the audiovisual recordings of classes at a secondary school over one and a half month's time, acquired continuous engagement labeling per student (N=15) in repeated sessions, and explored computer vision methods to classify engagement levels from faces in the classroom. We trained deep embeddings for attentional and emotional features, training Attention-Net for head pose estimation and Affect-Net for facial expression recognition. We additionally trained different engagement classifiers, consisting of Support Vector Machines, Random Forest, Multilayer Perceptron, and Long Short-Term Memory, for both features. The best performing engagement classifiers achieved AUCs of .620 and .720 in Grades 8 and 12, respectively. We further investigated fusion strategies and found score-level fusion either improves the engagement classifiers or is on par with the best performing modality. We also investigated the effect of personalization and found that using only 60-seconds of person-specific data selected by margin uncertainty of the base classifier yielded an average AUC improvement of .084. 4.Our main aim with this work is to provide the technical means to facilitate the manual data analysis of classroom videos in research on teaching quality and in the context of teacher training.

Ömer Sümer, Peter Gerjets, Ulrich Trautwein et al.

Understanding students' and teachers' verbal and non-verbal behaviours during instruction may help infer valuable information regarding the quality of teaching. In education research, there have been many studies that aim to measure students' attentional focus on learning-related tasks: Based on audio-visual recordings and manual or automated ratings of behaviours of teachers and students. Student data is, however, highly sensitive. Therefore, ensuring high standards of data protection and privacy has the utmost importance in current practices. For example, in the context of teaching management studies, data collection is carried out with the consent of pupils, parents, teachers and school administrations. Nevertheless, there may often be students whose data cannot be used for research purposes. Excluding these students from the classroom is an unnatural intrusion into the organisation of the classroom. A possible solution would be to request permission to record the audio-visual recordings of all students (including those who do not voluntarily participate in the study) and to anonymise their data. Yet, the manual anonymisation of audio-visual data is very demanding. In this study, we examine the use of artificial intelligence methods to automatically anonymise the visual and audio data of a particular person.

Ömer Sümer, Patricia Goldberg, Kathleen Stürmer et al.

The ability for a teacher to engage all students in active learning processes in classroom constitutes a crucial prerequisite for enhancing students achievement. Teachers' attentional processes provide important insights into teachers' ability to focus their attention on relevant information in the complexity of classroom interaction and distribute their attention across students in order to recognize the relevant needs for learning. In this context, mobile eye tracking is an innovative approach within teaching effectiveness research to capture teachers' attentional processes while teaching. However, analyzing mobile eye-tracking data by hand is time consuming and still limited. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to enhance the impact of mobile eye tracking by connecting it with computer vision. In mobile eye tracking videos from an educational study using a standardized small group situation, we apply a state-ofthe-art face detector, create face tracklets, and introduce a novel method to cluster faces into the number of identity. Subsequently, teachers' attentional focus is calculated per student during a teaching unit by associating eye tracking fixations and face tracklets. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to combine computer vision and mobile eye tracking to model teachers' attention while instructing.