The NCTE Transcripts: A Dataset of Elementary Math Classroom Transcripts

Dorottya Demszky, Heather Hill


Abstract
Classroom discourse is a core medium of instruction analyzing it can provide a window into teaching and learning as well as driving the development of new tools for improving instruction. We introduce the largest dataset of mathematics classroom transcripts available to researchers, and demonstrate how this data can help improve instruction. The dataset consists of 1,660 45-60 minute long 4th and 5th grade elementary mathematics observations collected by the National Center for Teacher Effectiveness (NCTE) between 2010-2013. The anonymized transcripts represent data from 317 teachers across 4 school districts that serve largely historically marginalized students. The transcripts come with rich metadata, including turn-level annotations for dialogic discourse moves, classroom observation scores, demographic information, survey responses and student test scores. We demonstrate that our natural language processing model, trained on our turn-level annotations, can learn to identify dialogic discourse moves and these moves are correlated with better classroom observation scores and learning outcomes. This dataset opens up several possibilities for researchers, educators and policymakers to learn about and improve K-12 instruction. The dataset can be found at https://github.com/ddemszky/classroom-transcript-analysis.
Anthology ID:
2023.bea-1.44
Volume:
Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2023)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Ekaterina Kochmar, Jill Burstein, Andrea Horbach, Ronja Laarmann-Quante, Nitin Madnani, Anaïs Tack, Victoria Yaneva, Zheng Yuan, Torsten Zesch
Venue:
BEA
SIG:
SIGEDU
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
528–538
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.bea-1.44
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.bea-1.44
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dorottya Demszky and Heather Hill. 2023. The NCTE Transcripts: A Dataset of Elementary Math Classroom Transcripts. In Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2023), pages 528–538, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The NCTE Transcripts: A Dataset of Elementary Math Classroom Transcripts (Demszky & Hill, BEA 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.bea-1.44.pdf