EXP: Collaborative Research: Cyber-enabled Teacher Discourse Analytics to Empower Teacher Learning

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This project will use multiple sources of middle school classroom data to give feedback and assessment information to teachers so that their teaching ability is enhanced. The data includes anonymized student performance data (grades and standardized test results) and anonymized existing audio recordings of classroom discussions between students and teachers. The audio data will be used to analyze the student-teacher discussions for effectiveness of the student-teacher discussions in student learning. As the effectiveness measures are developed, feedback for instructional improvement will be provided to the teachers in a design cycle for continuous improvement. The technological innovations are in the analysis of the student-teacher discussions, in natural language understanding of student-teacher discussions, and in machine learning to classify effective from non-effective student-teacher discussions.This project will advance cyber-enabled, teacher analytics as a new genre of technology that provides automated feedback on teacher performance with the goal of improving teaching effectiveness and student achievement. The exemplary implementation will autonomously analyze audio from real-world English and language arts classes for indicators of effective discourse to enable a new paradigm of datadriven reflective practice. The project emphasizes six theoretical dimensions of discourse linked to student achievement growth: goal clarity, disciplinary concepts, and strategy use for teacher-led discourse, and challenge, connection, and elaborated feedback for transactional discourse. The innovation aims to help teachers develop expertise on these dimensions and will be developed and tested in 9th grade classrooms in Western Pennsylvania. The team will first generate initial insights on how teacher discourse predicts student achievement via a re-analysis of large volumes (128 hours) of existing classroom audio. Next, they will design and iteratively refine hardware/software interfaces for efficient,flexible, scalable audio data collection by teachers. The data will be used to computationally model dimensions of effective discourse by combining linguistic, discursive, acoustic, and contextual analysis of audio with supervised and semi-supervised deep recurrent neural networks. The model-based estimates will be incorporated into an interactive analytic/visualization platform to promote data-driven reflective practice. After refinement via design studies, the impact of the innovation on instructional improvement and student literacy outcomes will be evaluated in a randomized control trial. Finally, generalizable insights will be identified at every stage of the project to promote transferability to future cyber-enabled, teacher-analytics technologies.