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With the aim to provide teachers with more specific, frequent, and actionable feedback about their teaching, we explore how Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used to estimate "Instructional Support" domain scores of the CLassroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), a widely used observation protocol. We design a machine learning architecture that uses either zero-shot prompting of Meta's Llama2, and/or a classic Bag of Words (BoW) model, to classify individual utterances of teachers' speech (transcribed automatically using OpenAI's Whisper) for the presence of Instructional Support. Then, these utterance-level judgments are aggregated over a 15-min observation session to estimate a global CLASS score. Experiments on two CLASS-coded datasets of toddler and pre-kindergarten classrooms indicate that (1) automatic CLASS Instructional Support estimation accuracy using the proposed method (Pearson R up to 0.48) approaches human inter-rater reliability (up to R=0.55); (2) LLMs generally yield slightly greater accuracy than BoW for this task, though the best models often combined features extracted from both LLM and BoW; and (3) for classifying individual utterances, there is still room for improvement of automated methods compared to human-level judgments. Finally, (4) we illustrate how the model's outputs can be visualized at the utterance level to provide teachers with explainable feedback on which utterances were most positively or negatively correlated with specific CLASS dimensions. 

We devised and evaluated a multi-modal machine learning-based system to analyze videos of school classrooms for "positive climate" and "negative climate", which are two dimensions of the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS). School classrooms are highly cluttered audiovisual scenes containing many overlapping faces and voices. Due to the difficulty of labeling them (reliable coding requires weeks of training) and their sensitive nature (students and teachers may be in stressful or potentially embarrassing situations), CLASS- labeled classroom video datasets are scarce, and their labels are sparse (just a few labels per 15-minute video dip). Thus, the overarching challenge was how to harness modern deep perceptual architectures despite the paucity of labeled data. Through training low-level CNN-based facial attribute detectors (facial expression & adult/child) as well as a direct audio-to- climate regressor, and by integrating low-level information over time using a Bi-LSTM, we constructed automated detectors of positive and negative classroom climate with accuracy (10- fold cross-validation Pearson correlation on 241 CLASS-labeled videos) of 0.40 and 0.51, respectively. These numbers are superior to what we obtained using shallower architectures. This work represents the first automated system designed to detect specific dimensions of the CLASS.