A Speaker Diarization System for Studying Peer-Led Team Learning Groups

Peer-led team learning (PLTL) is a model for teaching STEM courses where small student groups meet periodically to collaboratively discuss coursework. Automatic analysis of PLTL sessions would help education researchers to get insight into how learning outcomes are impacted by individual participation, group behavior, team dynamics, etc.. Towards this, speech and language technology can help, and speaker diarization technology will lay the foundation for analysis. In this study, a new corpus is established called CRSS-PLTL, that contains speech data from 5 PLTL teams over a semester (10 sessions per team with 5-to-8 participants in each team). In CRSS-PLTL, every participant wears a LENA device (portable audio recorder) that provides multiple audio recordings of the event. Our proposed solution is unsupervised and contains a new online speaker change detection algorithm, termed G 3 algorithm in conjunction with Hausdorff-distance based clustering to provide improved detection accuracy. Additionally, we also exploit cross channel information to refine our diarization hypothesis. The proposed system provides good improvements in diarization error rate (DER) over the baseline LIUM system. We also present higher level analysis such as the number of conversational turns taken in a session, and speaking-time duration (participation) for each speaker.Comment: 5 Pages, 2 Figures, 2 Tables, Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2016, San Francisco, US

Postsecondary peer cooperative learning programs: Annotated bibliography 2018

This 2018 annotated bibliography reviews seven postsecondary peer cooperative learning programs that have been implemented nationally and internationally to increase student achievement. An extensive literature search was conducted of published journal articles, newspaper accounts, book chapters, books, ERIC documents, thesis and dissertations, online documents, and unpublished reports. Peer learning programs in this bibliography meet the following characteristics: (a) program must have been implemented at the postsecondary or tertiary level, (b) program has a clear set of systematic procedures for its implementation at an institution, (c) program evaluation studies have been conducted and are available for review, (d) program intentionally embeds learning strategy practice along with a review of the academic content material, (e) program outcomes include both increased content knowledge with higher persistence rates, and (f) program has been replicated at another institution with similar positive student outcomes. From a review of the professional literature, nearly 1,500 citations emerged concerning seven programs that met the previously mentioned selection criteria: "Accelerated Learning Groups" (ALGs), "Emerging Scholars Program" (ESP), "Peer-Assisted Learning" (PAL), "Peer-Led Team Learning" (PLTL), "Structured Learning Assistance" (SLA), "Supplemental Instruction" (SI), and "Video-based Supplemental Instruction" (VSI). Nearly one fourth of the entries in this bibliography are from authors and researchers outside of United States. Guidance is provided to implement best practices of peer learning programs that can improve academic achievement, persistence to graduation, and professional growth of participants and facilitators of these student-led groups. The literature reports not only positive outcomes for the student participants of such programs, but includes outcomes for the student peer leaders of these academic support programs such as skill improvement with leadership, public speaking, and other employment skills along with an impact of their future vocational choices including a career in teaching at the secondary or postsecondary level. Educators need to investigate these peer learning programs to discover effective learning practices that can be adapted and adopted for use in supporting higher student achievement for students of diverse backgrounds. [This annotated bibliography is a revised and expanded version of ED565496, ED545639, ED489957, and ED574832