Automatic Measurement of Teachers' Talk: Indicators of Location and Quality in Science Activities

A key goal of Next Generation Science Standards is to promote interest and exploration of natural phenomena. In preschool settings, teachers prompt exploration by asking questions, encouraging informal exploration and experimentation. To date, live or offline video observation has been the sole way to capture the quality of teacher question asking in the pre-k classroom (e.g., Sanders et al., 2016). To date, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has not been used to measure the content/quality of teacher talk. Here, we used ASR to quantify preschool teachers’ use of keywords that promote student exploration and inquiry.