Annotating Student Talk in Text-based Classroom Discussions
This work addresses the need for tools to assess student discourse in education, with potential applications in NLP, but is incremental as it builds on existing research on classroom interactions.
The paper tackled the problem of analyzing student talk in classroom discussions by developing an annotation scheme for argumentation, specificity, and knowledge domain, and showed that this scheme produces reliable annotations and predicts discussion quality.
Classroom discussions in English Language Arts have a positive effect on students' reading, writing and reasoning skills. Although prior work has largely focused on teacher talk and student-teacher interactions, we focus on three theoretically-motivated aspects of high-quality student talk: argumentation, specificity, and knowledge domain. We introduce an annotation scheme, then show that the scheme can be used to produce reliable annotations and that the annotations are predictive of discussion quality. We also highlight opportunities provided by our scheme for education and natural language processing research.