Detection of collaboration: Relationship between log and speech-based classification

Research in the field of collaboration shows that students do not spontaneously collaborate with each other. A system that can measure collaboration in real time could be useful by, for example, helping the teacher locate a group requiring guidance. To address this challenge, my research focuses on building and comparing collaboration detectors for different types of classroom problem solving activities, such as card sorting and hand writing. I am also studying transfer: how collaboration detectors for one task can be used with a new task. Finally, we attempt to build a teachers dashboard that can describe reasoning behind the triggered alerts thereby helping the teachers with insights to aid the collaborative activity. Data for building such detectors were collected in the form of verbal interaction and user action logs from students’ tablets. Three qualitative levels of interactivity was distinguished: Collaboration, Cooperation and Asymmetric Contribution. Machine learning was used to induce a classifier that can assign a code for every episode based on the set of features. Our preliminary results indicate that machine learned classifiers were reliable.