Recognizing Dialogue Content in Student Collaborative Conversation

This paper describes efforts to both promote and recognize student dialogue in free-entry text discussion within an inquiry-learning environment. First, we discuss collaborative tools that enable students to work together and how these tools can potentially focus student effort on subject matter. We then show how our tutor uses an expert knowledge base to recognize (with 88% success rate) when students are discussing content relevant to the problem and to correctly link (with 70% success) that content with an actual topic. Subsets of the data indicate that even better results are possible. This research provides solid support for the concept of using a knowledge base to recognize content in free-entry text discussion. The paper concludes by demonstrating how this content recognition can be used to support students engaged in problem-solving activities.