- G. Gweon, Pulkit Agrawal, Nitish Srivastava, Shantanu Agrawal, Abhilash Jindal, Marietta Sionti, B. Raj, C. Rosé. 2010. Automatic assessment of student “reasoning” processes in face-to-face interactions using speech data. Abstract: Assessment of student reasoning processes is one of the holy grails of intelligent tutoring. One way in which students display their reasoning is through conversation. In this paper we present work towards detecting where students are displaying “reasoning” in conversational speech. Such technology would add to the body of work in educational data mining another means of monitoring student work. Because the concept of reasoning is somewhat abstract, we first discuss how we have operationalized it, achieving an agreement of 0.67 kappa between human raters. We then discuss how we have used machine learning technology to predict whether a given speech segment contains a reasoning statement using features that can be extracted automatically using simple audio signal processing techniques. The result is promising with an f-score of 0.63.
