Is ChatGPT a Good Teacher Coach? Measuring Zero-Shot Performance For Scoring and Providing Actionable Insights on Classroom Instruction

Rose Wang, Dorottya Demszky


Abstract
Coaching, which involves classroom observation and expert feedback, is a widespread and fundamental part of teacher training. However, the majority of teachers do not have access to consistent, high quality coaching due to limited resources and access to expertise. We explore whether generative AI could become a cost-effective complement to expert feedback by serving as an automated teacher coach. In doing so, we propose three teacher coaching tasks for generative AI: (A) scoring transcript segments based on classroom observation instruments, (B)identifying highlights and missed opportunities for good instructional strategies, and (C) providing actionable suggestions for eliciting more student reasoning. We recruit expert math teachers to evaluate the zero-shot performance of ChatGPT on each of these tasks for elementary math classroom transcripts. Our results reveal that ChatGPT generates responses that are relevant to improving instruction, but they are often not novel or insightful. For example, 82% of the model’s suggestions point to places in the transcript where the teacher is already implementing that suggestion. Our work highlights the challenges of producing insightful, novel and truthful feedback for teachers while paving the way for future research to address these obstacles and improve the capacity of generative AI to coach teachers.
Anthology ID:
2023.bea-1.53
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:
626–667
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.bea-1.53
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.bea-1.53
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rose Wang and Dorottya Demszky. 2023. Is ChatGPT a Good Teacher Coach? Measuring Zero-Shot Performance For Scoring and Providing Actionable Insights on Classroom Instruction. In Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2023), pages 626–667, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Is ChatGPT a Good Teacher Coach? Measuring Zero-Shot Performance For Scoring and Providing Actionable Insights on Classroom Instruction (Wang & Demszky, BEA 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.bea-1.53.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.bea-1.53.mp4