Understanding Characteristics of Teacher-Student Dialogue in Urban-Rural Blended Synchronous Classroom: A Learning Analytics Perspective

The blended synchronous classroom (BSC) is an important form to promote the equity of urban and rural education. Compared with the traditional single-teacher classroom, the interaction has the characteristics of multi-objects in BSC. The teacher-student dialogue directly influences the teaching effectiveness of such classrooms. However, most existing research focuses on counting the frequency of teacher-student interaction, in similar teaching activities, which might overlook the quality and depth of teacher-student dialogue. To fill this gap, this research uses a variety of learning analytics and data mining methods (e.g., lag sequence analysis, social network analysis and K-means) to detect fine-grained attributes of transitions of teacher-student dialogue in 40 BSC lessons, based on Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives theory. The results show two kinds of classroom dialogue characteristics, as well as the transformation characteristics of questioning behaviors and the key questioning behaviors. This research deepens the understanding of the diversity of teacher-student dialogue and offers practical implications for improving the quality of classroom dialogue in BSC.