Investigating Patterns Of Tone And Sentiment In Teacher Written Feedback Messages

Feedback is a crucial factor in mathematics learning and instruction. Whether expressed as indicators of correctness or textual comments, feedback can help guide students’ understanding of content. Beyond this, however, teacher-written messages and comments can provide motivational and affective benefits for students. The question emerges as to what constitutes effective feedback to promote not only student learning but also motivation and engagement. Teachers may have different perceptions of what constitutes effective feedback utilizing different tones in their writing to communicate their sentiment while assessing student work. This study aims to investigate trends in teacher sentiment and tone when providing feedback to students in a middle school mathematics class context. Toward this, we examine the applicability of state-of-the-art sentiment analysis methods in a mathematics context and explore the use of punctuation marks in teacher feedback messages as a measure of tone. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.