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ERIC Number: ED672178
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2022-Aug
Pages: N/A
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: 0000-00-00
Computationally Identifying Funneling and Focusing Questions in Classroom Discourse. EdWorkingPaper No. 22-633
Sterling Alic; Dorottya Demszky; Zid Mancenido; Jing Liu; Heather C. Hill; Dan Jurafsky
Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University
Responsive teaching is a highly effective strategy that promotes student learning. In math classrooms, teachers might funnel students towards a normative answer or focus students to reflect on their own thinking, deepening their understanding of math concepts. When teachers focus, they treat students' contributions as resources for collective sensemaking, and thereby significantly improve students' achievement and confidence in mathematics. We propose the task of computationally detecting funneling and focusing questions in classroom discourse. We do so by creating and releasing an annotated dataset of 2,348 teacher utterances labeled for funneling and focusing questions, or neither. We introduce supervised and unsupervised approaches to differentiating these questions. Our best model, a supervised RoBERTa model fine-tuned on our dataset, has a strong linear correlation of 0.76 with human expert labels and with positive educational outcomes, including math instruction quality and student achievement, showing the model's potential for use in automated teacher feedback tools. Our unsupervised measures show significant but weaker correlations with human labels and outcomes, and they highlight interesting linguistic patterns of funneling and focusing questions. The high performance of the supervised measure indicates its promise for supporting teachers in their instruction.
Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University. Brown University Box 1985, Providence, RI 02912. Tel: 401-863-7990; Fax: 401-863-1290; e-mail: annenberg@brown.edu; Web site: https://annenberg.brown.edu/
Publication Type: Reports - Research
Education Level: Elementary Secondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A