Automatic detection of collaboration quality from the students’ speech could support teachers in monitoring group dynamics, diagnosing issues, and developing pedagogical intervention plans. To address the challenge of mapping characteristics of individuals’ speech to information about the group, we coded behavioral and learning-related indicators of collaboration at the individual level. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of predicting the quality of collaboration among a group of students working together to solve a math problem from human-labelled collaboration indicators. We use a corpus of 6th, 7th, and 8th grade students working in groups of three to solve math problems collaboratively. Researchers labelled both the group-level collaboration quality during each problem and the student-level collaboration indicators. Results using random forests reveal that the individual indicators of collaboration aid in the prediction of group collaboration quality.
Whitepaper
A System of Measures to Support Improvement in Teacher Preparation
This paper proposes a system of measures that campus-district partnerships can develop to guide and assess reforms in four key areas of their teacher preparation programs: 1) partnership with districts, 2) prioritized skills, 3) practice-based clinical preparation, and 4) formative feedback on prioritized skills. Our findings are based on lessons learned from improvement science work associated with NGEI, a multiyear effort to improve teacher preparation at 11 California State Universities teacher preparation programs in partnership with local public-school districts.
Improvement Science in Teacher Preparation at California State University: How Teacher Preparation Partnerships are Building Capacity to Learn to Improve
This paper describes how three principles of improvement science guided reforms at teacher preparation programs (TPPs) participating in the New Generation of Educators Initiative (NGEI): 1) all improvement begins with dissatisfaction with the status quo; 2) every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets; and 3) all improvement requires change, but not every change is an improvement. NGEI was a multiyear effort to improve teacher preparation at 11 California State Universities TPPs in partnership with local public-school districts.
