Automated Feedback to Peer Tutors Increases Their Talk Moves and Learner Reasoning but Not the Balance of Talk

Abstract

Automated feedback on classroom discourse improves instruction in professional and online teaching contexts, and recent work suggests that delivering similar feedback to learners may strengthen these effects by sharing responsibility for participation. Whether this holds in small-group volunteer tutoring has not been tested. We present results from a randomized controlled trial across two four-week SAT mathematics bootcamps on the Schoolhouse.world platform, involving 1,030 volunteer tutors, 7,443 learners and 6,508 recorded sessions. Tutors were randomly assigned to receive no feedback, automated feedback on their own discourse, or that feedback together with participation feedback delivered to their learners under one of two motivational framings. Feedback to tutors increased eliciting of learner ideas, uptake of learner contributions, and learner reasoning by 8-15%, and the pattern replicated across both bootcamps. However, tutor talk time, which averaged 91.5% in the control group, did not change in any condition, and learner-facing feedback did not further change discourse. Interviews with 17 tutors indicate that they adopted the moves the feedback recommended but were limited by learners who did not respond. Interviews with 13 learners suggest why the learner-facing feedback had little effect: it reported a group-level rather than a learner-level statistic, some learners preferred to listen, and learner-to-learner interaction was rare in these sessions. Automated feedback can change how tutors invite learner thinking, but shifting how much learners talk likely requires changes beyond feedback.