Towards automatic assessment for project based learning groups

Project course instructors routinely perform their formal assessments based on impressions formed from their mostly indirect experience with the groups they oversee. Nevertheless, even with their limited vantage point, instructors trust their ability to make assessments and regulate group work. In this paper we present a 5 dimensional assessment framework based on data from an interview study in which we investigate the assessment goals that project course instructors have. We use this framework to identify specifically where instructors' assessments about students diverge most from that of direct observers of group work. We then demonstrate that indicators extracted automatically from recorded speech from group meetings frequently correlate better with objective observer rating of students than that of the instructor.