Towards domain general detection of transactive knowledge building behavior

Support of discussion based learning at scale benefits from automated analysis of discussion for enabling effective assignment of students to project teams, for triggering dynamic support of group learning processes, and for assessment of those learning processes. A major limitation of much past work in machine learning applied to automated analysis of discussion is the failure of the models to generalize to data outside of the parameters of the context in which the training data was collected. This limitation means that a separate training effort must be undertaken for each domain in which the models will be used. This paper focuses on a specific construct of discussion based learning referred to as Transactivity and provides a novel machine learning approach with performance that exceeds state-of-the-art performance within the same domain in which it was trained and a new domain, and does not suffer any reduction in performance when transferring to the new domain. These results stand as an advance over past work on automated detection of Transactivity and increase the value of trained models for supporting group learning at scale. Implications for practice in at-scale learning environments are discussed.