Agora: Motivating and Measuring Engagement in Large-Class Discussions
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cold calling effectively incentivizes all students to actively prepare contributions to a class discussion, but some find it terrifying. Rewarding voluntarily speaking in class is less off-putting, and can be valuable for students who participate; however, it can allow a large fraction of the class to disengage. Agora is an open-source app designed to serve as a middle ground between these extremes, with the added benefit that it automatically produces an assessment of each student's engagement. The key ideas are to give students control over whether their hand is raised or lowered, to choose randomly among students with raised hands, and to give participation credit to all students who were considered every time a speaker is chosen. The system has various other features to facilitate deployment in large classes including multiple queues to support concurrent questions on different topics; a message board to allow students to communicate discretely with the instructor; and polling. We deployed the system in three offerings of a large undergraduate class and demonstrate its effectiveness in terms of learning outcomes, gender balance in participation, and student satisfaction.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it