Tao, S., & Dutta, S., & Seven, Y. N., & Irvin, D., & Buzhardt, J., & Hansen, J. H. L. (2022, March), Quantifying Engagement in Preschool Classrooms - Conversational Turn-Taking & Topic Initiations   Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Gulf Southwest Annual Conference, Prairie View, Texas. 10.18260/1-2--39202

\bibitem{asee_peer_39202}
  Tao, S., \& Dutta, S., \& Seven, Y. N., \& Irvin, D., \& Buzhardt, J., \& Hansen, J. H. L. (2022, March), \emph{Quantifying Engagement in Preschool Classrooms - Conversational Turn-Taking \& Topic Initiations }
  Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Gulf Southwest Annual Conference, Prairie View, Texas.
  10.18260/1-2--39202

Sarah Tao, Satwik Dutta, Yagmur N/A Seven, Dwight Irvin, Jay Buzhardt, and John H. L. Hansen.  "Quantifying Engagement in Preschool Classrooms - Conversational Turn-Taking & Topic Initiations ".  2022 ASEE Gulf Southwest Annual Conference, Prairie View, Texas, 2022, March.  ASEE Conferences, 2022.  https://peer.asee.org/39202 Internet.  20 Jan, 2025

\bibitem{asee_peer_39202}
  Sarah Tao, Satwik Dutta, Yagmur N/A Seven, Dwight Irvin, Jay Buzhardt, and John H. L. Hansen.
  "Quantifying Engagement in Preschool Classrooms - Conversational Turn-Taking \& Topic Initiations ".
  \emph{2022 ASEE Gulf Southwest Annual Conference, Prairie View, Texas, 2022, March}.
  ASEE Conferences, 2022.
  https://peer.asee.org/39202 Internet.  20 Jan, 2025

@INPROCEEDINGS{asee_peer_39202
author = "Sarah Tao, Satwik Dutta, Yagmur N/A Seven, Dwight Irvin, Jay Buzhardt, and John H. L. Hansen"
title = "Quantifying Engagement in Preschool Classrooms - Conversational Turn-Taking \& Topic Initiations "
booktitle = "2022 ASEE Gulf Southwest Annual Conference"
year = "2022"
month = "March"
address = "Prairie View, Texas"
publisher = "ASEE Conferences"
note = {https://peer.asee.org/39202}
number = {10.18260/1-2--39202}
}

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - Adult-child interaction is an important component for language development in young children. However, such development varies based on the quality and quantity of these conversations. Teachers responsible for the language acquisition of their students have a vested interest in improving such conversation in their classrooms. Advancements in speech technology and natural language processing can be used as an effective tool by teachers in pre-school classrooms, to acquire large amounts of conversational data, receive feedback from automated conversational analysis, and use it to improve and amend their teaching methods. Measuring engagement among pre-school children and teachers is a challenging task and not well defined. Conversational turn-taking and topic initiations are two factors of conversational engagement. In this study, we focus on developing criteria to measure conversational turn-taking and topic initiation during adult-child interactions in preschool environments. More specifically, our goal is to create measures and visualizations which can reflect mutual conversational engagement for children/students and teachers/adults. A conversational turn is when an adult speaks, and a child follows, or vice versa, with no longer than 5 seconds in between. Any sound is counted as a response. Topic initiation refers to the statement that prompts the first conversational turn in an adult-child verbal exchange on a certain subject. If the topic spoken about changed, or more than 5 seconds went by without a response, a new topic initiation was noted. Child initiations refer to a child beginning a conversation while adult initiations refer to an adult beginning a conversation. A total of 5, 30-minute recordings and transcripts of adult-child interaction sessions were analyzed – out of which 3 were of typically developing children and 2 were of children with speech or language delays. Conversational turns were used to track the length of a conversation, but not to track vocabulary complexity, as a turn includes any sound as a response and speaking words is not necessary for a turn to occur. This was most noticeable in children with speech delays, as their responses were usually less than 5 words. Adult conversation initiation was found to promote more conversational turns, but their effectiveness was mitigated by the lower average target PMLU score used to measure children’s noun complexity. Counting vocabulary produced by children does not distinguish between repeated use of words or identify complexity of the words used. We used topic initiations and conversational turns as indicators of conversational quality. The next iterative of this problem is to deploy various solutions from speech and language processing technology to automate the measurements. Counting conversational turns, conversation initiations, or vocabulary alone is not enough to judge the quality of a conversation and track language acquisition. It is necessary to use a combination of the three and include a measurement of the complexity of vocabulary. 
AU  - Sarah Tao
AU  - Satwik Dutta
AU  - Yagmur N/A Seven
AU  - Dwight Irvin
AU  - Jay Buzhardt
AU  - John H. L. Hansen
CY  - Prairie View, Texas
DA  - 2022/03/16
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Quantifying Engagement in Preschool Classrooms - Conversational Turn-Taking & Topic Initiations 
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/39202
DO  - 10.18260/1-2--39202
ER  -