Preservice Teachers’ Stress and Speech Quality: A Virtual Reality and Natural Language Processing Approach

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 3:05 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Enhancing Teacher Capacities Through Technological Innovation (Table 22)

Abstract

What can teachers’ speech reveal about their stress state and instructional quality? A fundamental feature of a speech is its lexical diversity (LD)— the range and variety of vocabulary. The present study utilized an audio-recording-capable VR classroom together with natural language processing (NLP) to evaluate the relationships between preservice teachers' stress reactions and the LD of their speech (Study 1); we replicated the analysis with a different sample from the same population and examined the associations between LD and instructional quality (Study 2). We found that participants’ self-reported stress reactions were negatively associated with the LD of their speech; and LD metrics were positively associated with an instructional quality dimension (emotional support ) measured through Secondary CLASS (Pianta et al., 2012).

Authors

• Yizhen Huang, University of Potsdam

• Von Georg Felix Reuth, University of Potsdam

• Eric Richter, KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt

• Thilo Kleickmann, Kiel University

• Dirk Richter, University of Potsdam