Spoken Interruptions Signal Productive Problem Solving and Domain Expertise in Mathematics

Prevailing social norms prohibit interrupting another person when they are speaking. In this research, simultaneous speech was investigated in groups of students as they jointly solved math problems and peer tutored one another. Analyses were based on the Math Data Corpus, which includes ground-truth performance coding and speech transcriptions. Simultaneous speech was elevated 120-143% during the most productive phase of problem solving, compared with matched intervals. It also was elevated 18-37% in students who were domain experts, compared with non-experts. Qualitative analyses revealed that experts differed from non-experts in the function of their interruptions. Analysis of these functional asymmetries produced nine key behaviors that were used to identify the dominant math expert in a group with 95-100% accuracy in three minutes. This research demonstrates that overlapped speech is a marker of group problem-solving progress and domain expertise. It provides valuable information for the emerging field of learning analytics.