How Tutor Discourse Shares or Splits Attention Across Students in Small-Group Tutoring

Tutoring is an important educational tool and what the teacher attends to has important consequences for more equitable learning. In small group tutoring, instructors pay individualized attention to students to offer opportunities for authentic engagement and mastery learning. In the meantime, interventions with more students instructed by a single tutor at the same time require the instructor to skillfully direct their attention to the learners, for both facilitating collective learning opportunities and ensuring equity amongst students. In this study, we develop a framework to measure instructional attention in small group settings. We automatically evaluate whom an instructor talks to using data collected from a study of 2:1 small group tutoring as a case study to analyze patterns in tutor discourse. Our method demonstrates the potential of computational linguistics in a more fine-grained understanding of instructional practice. We identify effective strategies that tutors adopt to navigate the dual demands of addressing individual learning needs while also maintaining group cohesion.