Exploring Effective Strategies for Building a Customised GPT Agent for Coding Classroom Dialogues

This study investigates effective strategies for developing a customised GPT agent to code classroom dialogue. While classroom dialogue is widely recognised as a crucial element of education, its analysis remains challenging due to the need for a nuanced understanding of dialogic functions and the labour-intensive nature of manual transcript coding. Recent advancements in large language models offer promising avenues for automating this process. However, existing studies predominantly focus on training large-scale models or evaluating pre-trained models with fixed codebooks, which are often not applicable or replicable for dialogue researchers working with small datasets or customised coding schemes. Using GPT-4's MyGPT agent as a case, this study evaluates its baseline performance in coding classroom dialogue with a human codebook and examines how performance varies with different example inputs through a variable control method. Through a design-based research approach, it identifies a set of practical strategies, based on MyGPT's unique features, for configuring effective agents with limited data. The findings suggest that, despite some limitations, a MyGPT agent developed with these strategies can serve as a useful coding assistant by generating coding suggestions.