The Effect of Mutual Gaze Perception on Students' Verbal Coordination
Bertrand Schneider, Roy D. Pea · 2014
In a previous study, we found that real-time mutual gaze perception (i.e., being able to see the gaze of your partner in real time on a computer screen while solving a learning task) had a positive effect on students ’ collaboration and learning [8]. The goals of this paper are to: 1) explore a variety of computational techniques for analyzing the transcripts of students ’ discussions; 2) examine whether any of those measures sheds new light on our previous results; and 3) test whether those metrics have any predictive power regarding learning outcomes. Using various natural language processing algorithms, we found that linguistic coordination (i.e., the extent to which students mimic each other in terms of their grammatical structure) did not predict the quality of student collaboration or learning gains. However, we found that the coherence of students ’ discourse was significantly different across our experimental conditions; this measure was positively correlated with their learning gains. Finally, using various language metrics, we were able to roughly (i.e., using a median-split) predict learning gains with a 94.4 % accuracy using Support Vector Machine. The accuracy dropped to 75 % when we used our model on a validation set. We conclude by discussing the benefits of using computational techniques on educational datasets.