Providing consistent, individualized feedback to teachers is essential for improving instruction but can be prohibitively resource-intensive in most educational contexts. We develop M-Powering Teachers, an automated tool based on natural language processing to give teachers feedback on their uptake of student contributions, a high-leverage dialogic teaching practice that makes students feel heard. We conduct a randomized controlled trial in an online computer science course (N = 1,136 instructors), to evaluate the effectiveness of our tool. We find that M-Powering Teachers improves instructors’ uptake of student contributions by 13% and present suggestive evidence that it also improves students’ satisfaction with the course and assignment completion. These results demonstrate the promise of M-Powering Teachers to complement existing efforts in teachers’ professional development.

Rose Wang, Qingyang Zhang, Carly Robinson, Susanna Loeb, Dorottya Demszky. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.