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Transcripts of teaching episodes can be effective tools to understand discourse patterns in classroom instruction. According to most educational experts, sustained classroom discourse is a critical component of equitable, engaging, and rich learning environments for students. This paper describes the TalkMoves dataset, composed of 567 human-annotated K-12 mathematics lesson transcripts (including entire lessons or portions of lessons) derived from video recordings. The set of transcripts primarily includes in-person lessons with whole-class discussions and/or small group work, as well as some online lessons. All of the transcripts are human-transcribed, segmented by the speaker (teacher or student), and annotated at the sentence level for ten discursive moves based on accountable talk theory. In addition, the transcripts include utterance-level information in the form of dialogue act labels based on the Switchboard Dialog Act Corpus. The dataset can be used by educators, policymakers, and researchers to understand the nature of teacher and student discourse in K-12 math classrooms. Portions of this dataset have been used to develop the TalkMoves application, which provides teachers with automated, immediate, and actionable feedback about their mathematics instruction., Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, Accepted for a Poster + Demo presentation at the 13th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation 2022

Often neglected in traditional education, spatial thinking has played a critical role in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. Spatial thinking skills can be enhanced by training, life experience, and practice. One approach to train these skills is through 3D modeling (also known as Computer-Aided Design or CAD). Although 3D modeling tools have shown promising results in training and enhancing spatial thinking skills in undergraduate engineering students when it comes to novices, especially middle and high-school students, they are not sufficient to provide rich 3D experience since the 3D models created in CAD are isolated the actual 3D physical world. Resulting in novice students finding it difficult to create error-free 3D models that would 3D print successfully. This leads to student frustration where students are not motivated to create 3D models themselves; instead, they prefer to download them from online repositories. To address this problem, researchers are focusing on integrating 3D models and displays into the physical world with the help of technologies like Augmented Reality (AR). In this demo, we present an AR application, 3DARVisualizer, that helps us explore the role of AR as a 3D model debugger, including enhancing 3D modeling abilities and spatial thinking skills of middle- and high-school students., Comment: Presented virtually as a Demo at the FabLearn Flagship conference, NYC 2020

TalkMoves is an innovative application designed to support K-12 mathematics teachers to reflect on, and continuously improve their instructional practices. This application combines state-of-the-art natural language processing capabilities with automated speech recognition to automatically analyze classroom recordings and provide teachers with personalized feedback on their use of specific types of discourse aimed at broadening and deepening classroom conversations about mathematics. These specific discourse strategies are referred to as "talk moves" within the mathematics education community and prior research has documented the ways in which systematic use of these discourse strategies can positively impact student engagement and learning. In this article, we describe the TalkMoves application's cloud-based infrastructure for managing and processing classroom recordings, and its interface for providing teachers with feedback on their use of talk moves during individual teaching episodes. We present the series of model architectures we developed, and the studies we conducted, to develop our best-performing, transformer-based model (F1 = 79.3%). We also discuss several technical challenges that need to be addressed when working with real-world speech and language data from noisy K-12 classrooms., Comment: Presented at the AAAI 2021 Spring Symposium on Artificial Intelligence for K-12 Education

The need for information systems to support the dissemination and reuse of educational resources has sparked a number of large-scale digital library efforts. This article describes usability findings from one such project--the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE)--focusing on its role in the process of educational resource reuse. Drawing upon a reuse model developed in the domain of software engineering, the reuse cycle is broken down into five stages: formulation of a reuse intention; location; comprehension; modification; and sharing. Using this model to analyze user studies in the DLESE project, several implications for library system design and library outreach activities are highlighted. One finding is that resource reuse occurs at different stages in the educational design process, and each stage imposes different and possibly conflicting requirements on digital library design. Another finding is that reuse is a distributed process across several artifacts, both within and outside of the library itself. In order for reuse to be successful, a usability line cannot be drawn at the library boundary, but instead must encompass both the library system and the educational resources themselves. (Contains 38 references.) (Author)

This paper describes how the authors are exploiting the potential of interactive World Wide Web media to support a central part of academic life--the publishing, critiquing, and discussion of documents. The paper begins with an overview of documents in academic life and a discussion of paper-based or "papyrocentric" print and scholarly work. The following design principles, underlying the environment for reading and critiquing Web documents that the D3E (Digital Document Discourse Environment) Publisher's Toolkit generates, are summarized: (1) avoid over-elaborate discussion structuring schemes; (2) integrate document media with discourse; (3) redesign work practices to emphasize discourse; and (4) support the new practices with tools. The process of publishing and critiquing Web documents using D3E is described, and its application to an educational multimedia electronic journal and to tutors and students in a distance learning scenario is illustrated. Areas for future work are considered. Three figures present D3E screens, including a publication form, output from a source HTML file, and a shared discussion space. Contains 23 references. (MES)