Discussion Tracker: Supporting Teacher Learning about Students' Collaborative Argumentation in High School Classrooms

Teaching collaborative argumentation is an advanced skill that many K-12 teachers struggle to develop. To address this, we have developed Discussion Tracker, a classroom discussion analytics system based on novel algorithms for classifying argument moves, specificity, and collaboration. Results from a classroom deployment indicate that teachers found the analytics useful, and that the underlying classifiers perform with moderate to substantial agreement with humans

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N

Analysis of Collaborative Argumentation in Text-based Classroom Discussions

Collaborative argumentation can be defined as the process of building evidence-based, reasoned knowledge through dialogue and it is the foundation for text-based, student-centered classroom discussions. Previous studies for analyzing classroom discussions, however, have not focused on the actual content of student talk. In this thesis, we develop a framework for analyzing student talk in multi-party, text-based classroom discussions to understand how students interact and collaboratively build arguments. The proposed framework will simultaneously consider multiple features, namely argumentation, specificity and collaboration. We additionally propose computational models to investigate three aspects: 1) automatically predicting specificity; 2) automatically predicting argument components, and investigating the importance of speaker-dependent context; 3) using multi-task learning to jointly predict all aspects of student talk and improve reliability

Teach Me How to Improve My Argumentation Skills: A Survey on Feedback in Argumentation

The use of argumentation in education has been shown to improve critical thinking skills for end-users such as students, and computational models for argumentation have been developed to assist in this process. Although these models are useful for evaluating the quality of an argument, they oftentimes cannot explain why a particular argument is considered poor or not, which makes it difficult to provide constructive feedback to users to strengthen their critical thinking skills. In this survey, we aim to explore the different dimensions of feedback (Richness, Visualization, Interactivity, and Personalization) provided by the current computational models for argumentation, and the possibility of enhancing the power of explanations of such models, ultimately helping learners improve their critical thinking skills.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure

Building Social Media Observatories for Monitoring Online Opinion Dynamics

Social media house a trove of relevant information for the study of online opinion dynamics. However, harvesting and analyzing the sheer overload of data that is produced by these media poses immense challenges to journalists, researchers, activists, policy makers, and concerned citizens. To mitigate this situation, this article discusses the creation of (social) media observatories: platforms that enable users to capture the complexities of social behavior, in particular the alignment and misalignment of opinions, through computational analyses of digital media data. The article positions the concept of "observatories" for social media monitoring among ongoing methodological developments in the computational social sciences and humanities and proceeds to discuss the technological innovations and design choices behind social media observatories currently under development for the study of opinions related to cultural and societal issues in European spaces. Notable attention is devoted to the construction of Penelope: an open, web-services-based infrastructure that allows different user groups to consult and contribute digital tools and observatories that suit their analytical needs. The potential and the limitations of this approach are discussed on the basis of a climate change opinion observatory that implements text analysis tools to study opinion dynamics concerning themes such as global warming. Throughout, the article explicitly acknowledges and addresses potential risks of the machine-guided and human-incentivized study of opinion dynamics. Concluding remarks are devoted to a synthesis of the ethical and epistemological implications of the exercise of positioning observatories in contemporary information spaces and to an examination of future pathways for the development of social media observatories

DeliData: a dataset for deliberation in multi-party problem solving

Group deliberation enables people to collaborate and solve problems, however, it is understudied due to a lack of resources. To this end, we introduce the first publicly available dataset containing collaborative conversations on solving a well-established cognitive task, consisting of 500 group dialogues and 14k utterances. In 64% of these conversations, the group members are able to find a better solution than they had identified individually, and in 43.8% of the groups who had a correct answer as their final solution, none of the participants had solved the task correctly by themselves. Furthermore, we propose a novel annotation schema that captures deliberation cues and release all 14k utterances annotated with it. Finally, we use the proposed dataset to develop and evaluate two methods for generating deliberation utterances. The data collection platform, dataset and annotated corpus are publicly available at https://delibot.xyz

Quantitative Perspectives on Fifty Years of the Journal of the History of Biology

Journal of the History of Biology provides a fifty-year long record for examining the evolution of the history of biology as a scholarly discipline. In this paper, we present a new dataset and preliminary quantitative analysis of the thematic content of JHB from the perspectives of geography, organisms, and thematic fields. The geographic diversity of authors whose work appears in JHB has increased steadily since 1968, but the geographic coverage of the content of JHB articles remains strongly lopsided toward the United States, United Kingdom, and western Europe and has diversified much less dramatically over time. The taxonomic diversity of organisms discussed in JHB increased steadily between 1968 and the late 1990s but declined in later years, mirroring broader patterns of diversification previously reported in the biomedical research literature. Finally, we used a combination of topic modeling and nonlinear dimensionality reduction techniques to develop a model of multi-article fields within JHB. We found evidence for directional changes in the representation of fields on multiple scales. The diversity of JHB with regard to the representation of thematic fields has increased overall, with most of that diversification occurring in recent years. Drawing on the dataset generated in the course of this analysis, as well as web services in the emerging digital history and philosophy of science ecosystem, we have developed an interactive web platform for exploring the content of JHB, and we provide a brief overview of the platform in this article. As a whole, the data and analyses presented here provide a starting-place for further critical reflection on the evolution of the history of biology over the past half-century.Comment: 45 pages, 14 figures, 4 table