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Creators/Authors contains: "Acosta, Halim"

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  1. Free, publicly-accessible full text available March 3, 2026
  2. Abstract Understanding students’ multi-party epistemic and topic based-dialogue contributions, or how students present knowledge in group-based chat interactions during collaborative game-based learning, offers valuable insights into group dynamics and learning processes. However, manually annotating these contributions is labor-intensive and challenging. To address this, we develop an automated method for recognizing dialogue acts from text chat data of small groups of middle school students interacting in a collaborative game-based learning environment. Our approach utilizes dual contrastive learning and label-aware data augmentation to fine-tune large language models’ underlying embedding representations within a supervised learning framework for epistemic and topic-based dialogue act classification. Results show that our method achieves a performance improvement of 4% to 8% over baseline methods in two key classification scenarios. These findings highlight the potential for automated dialogue act recognition to support understanding of how meaning-making occurs by focusing on the development and evolution of knowledge in group discourse, ultimately providing teachers with actionable insights to better support student learning. 
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  3. Benjamin, Paaßen; Carrie, Demmans Epp (Ed.)
    Collaborative game-based learning offers opportunities for students to participate in small group learning experiences that foster knowledge sharing, problem solving, and engagement. Student satisfaction with their collaborative experiences plays a pivotal role in shaping positive learning outcomes and is a critical factor in group success during learning. Gauging students申f satisfaction within collaborative learning contexts can offer insights into student engagement and participation levels while affording practitioners the ability to provide targeted interventions or scaffolding. In this paper,we propose a framework for inferring student collaboration satisfaction with multimodal learning analytics from collaborative interactions. Utilizing multimodal data collected from 50 middle school students engaged in collaborative game-based learning, we predict student collaboration satisfaction. We first evaluate the performance of baseline models on individual modalities for insight into which modalities are most informative. We then devise a multimodal deep learning model that leverages a cross-attention mechanism to attend to salient information across modalities to enhance collaboration satisfaction prediction. Finally,we conduct ablation and feature importance analysis to understand which combination of modalities and features is most effective. Findings indicate that various combinations of data sources are highly beneficial for student collaboration satisfaction prediction. 
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