Multimodal Assessment of Classroom Discourse Quality: A Text-Centered Attention-Based Multi-Task Learning Approach

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Hou, Ruikun, Bühler, Babette, Fütterer, Tim, Bozkir, Efe, Gerjets, Peter, Trautwein, Ulrich, Kasneci, Enkelejda
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Hou, Ruikun
Bühler, Babette
Fütterer, Tim
Bozkir, Efe
Gerjets, Peter
Trautwein, Ulrich
Kasneci, Enkelejda
author_facet Hou, Ruikun
Bühler, Babette
Fütterer, Tim
Bozkir, Efe
Gerjets, Peter
Trautwein, Ulrich
Kasneci, Enkelejda
contents Classroom discourse is an essential vehicle through which teaching and learning take place. Assessing different characteristics of discursive practices and linking them to student learning achievement enhances the understanding of teaching quality. Traditional assessments rely on manual coding of classroom observation protocols, which is time-consuming and costly. Despite many studies utilizing AI techniques to analyze classroom discourse at the utterance level, investigations into the evaluation of discursive practices throughout an entire lesson segment remain limited. To address this gap, our study proposes a novel text-centered multimodal fusion architecture to assess the quality of three discourse components grounded in the Global Teaching InSights (GTI) observation protocol: Nature of Discourse, Questioning, and Explanations. First, we employ attention mechanisms to capture inter- and intra-modal interactions from transcript, audio, and video streams. Second, a multi-task learning approach is adopted to jointly predict the quality scores of the three components. Third, we formulate the task as an ordinal classification problem to account for rating level order. The effectiveness of these designed elements is demonstrated through an ablation study on the GTI Germany dataset containing 92 videotaped math lessons. Our results highlight the dominant role of text modality in approaching this task. Integrating acoustic features enhances the model's consistency with human ratings, achieving an overall Quadratic Weighted Kappa score of 0.384, comparable to human inter-rater reliability (0.326). Our study lays the groundwork for the future development of automated discourse quality assessment to support teacher professional development through timely feedback on multidimensional discourse practices.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_07902
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multimodal Assessment of Classroom Discourse Quality: A Text-Centered Attention-Based Multi-Task Learning Approach
Hou, Ruikun
Bühler, Babette
Fütterer, Tim
Bozkir, Efe
Gerjets, Peter
Trautwein, Ulrich
Kasneci, Enkelejda
Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Classroom discourse is an essential vehicle through which teaching and learning take place. Assessing different characteristics of discursive practices and linking them to student learning achievement enhances the understanding of teaching quality. Traditional assessments rely on manual coding of classroom observation protocols, which is time-consuming and costly. Despite many studies utilizing AI techniques to analyze classroom discourse at the utterance level, investigations into the evaluation of discursive practices throughout an entire lesson segment remain limited. To address this gap, our study proposes a novel text-centered multimodal fusion architecture to assess the quality of three discourse components grounded in the Global Teaching InSights (GTI) observation protocol: Nature of Discourse, Questioning, and Explanations. First, we employ attention mechanisms to capture inter- and intra-modal interactions from transcript, audio, and video streams. Second, a multi-task learning approach is adopted to jointly predict the quality scores of the three components. Third, we formulate the task as an ordinal classification problem to account for rating level order. The effectiveness of these designed elements is demonstrated through an ablation study on the GTI Germany dataset containing 92 videotaped math lessons. Our results highlight the dominant role of text modality in approaching this task. Integrating acoustic features enhances the model's consistency with human ratings, achieving an overall Quadratic Weighted Kappa score of 0.384, comparable to human inter-rater reliability (0.326). Our study lays the groundwork for the future development of automated discourse quality assessment to support teacher professional development through timely feedback on multidimensional discourse practices.
title Multimodal Assessment of Classroom Discourse Quality: A Text-Centered Attention-Based Multi-Task Learning Approach
topic Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.07902