Pedagogical Debt Analyzer

What this is and isn't. The scoring rules are heuristic — keyword patterns and syntactic cues, not a validated instrument. They encode plausible operationalizations of four constructs, nothing more. The research question in P2 is whether rule-based scores like these correlate with expert human annotation and with student outcomes across a real syllabus corpus. Until that study is run, treat the numbers as a way to make the rubric concrete — not as a measurement.

Paste text to analyze

Scoring runs live as you type. Word count: 0

Inline match view

Phrases that matched a rule are highlighted by dimension.

Composite pedagogical debt

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Paste text or pick a preset to begin.

Motivational framing 0

Does the text create intellectual need before introducing technical tools? (Harel's necessity principle.)

Scaffolding visibility 0

Are intermediate checkpoints, office hours, and help resources named and normalized, or invisible?

Verification structure 0

Can a student know whether their work is correct before it is graded? (Self-check, test cases, worked examples.)

Belonging signals 0

Does the text signal that confusion is expected and help-seeking is welcomed, or that struggle is disqualifying?

How the scoring works

The analyzer runs a fixed set of regex rules against the input text. Each rule belongs to one of the four dimensions and carries a weight — positive rules move the dimension score toward 100 ("healthy"), negative rules move it toward 0 ("debt"). Each dimension starts at a neutral midpoint (50). When a rule fires, its weight is added to the dimension score and the matched span is recorded for the inline highlight. The composite pedagogical debt score is 100 − mean(dimension scores), so 0 is low debt and 100 is high debt.

The rule set is small and intentionally interpretable. Every rule firing is visible in the per-dimension breakdown on the right. You should be able to read the rules, disagree with one, and predict how the score would change if it were removed. That transparency is the whole point: a validated instrument that reads syllabus language would need exactly this kind of rule-level auditability before any community-college instructor would be asked to trust it.

Why these four dimensions

Motivational framing operationalizes Harel's claim that knowledge must be introduced in response to a problem the learner experiences as real. Texts that frame a topic with a concrete problem first score up; texts that lead with technical definitions and threat ("must", "required", "rigorous") score down.
Scaffolding visibility draws on the help-seeking literature — Karabenick, Newman, Ryan — which consistently finds that the biggest predictor of whether students use support resources is whether those resources are named, timed, and normalized in writing. "Office hours Tuesday 2–4 pm, no appointment needed" scores higher than "help is available upon request."
Verification structure captures whether the text gives students any way to know whether their work is correct before submitting it for a grade. Test cases, worked examples, self-check questions, reference outputs — these are cheap to provide and strongly associated with reduced help-seeking suppression in novices.
Belonging signals follows Walton & Cohen's belonging-uncertainty work and the stereotype-threat literature. Explicit normalization of confusion and struggle ("most students find this confusing the first time — that's expected") moves the score up; implicit gatekeeping ("this course is not for everyone", "expect to work harder than in any prior course") moves it down.

What this tool does not measure

Instructor intent. Real classroom experience. Whether the syllabus matches what actually happens in week 4. The tool reads only the text it is given, and even that reading is shallow — a regex over a few hundred words. The purpose is to make the rubric concrete and falsifiable, so that when P2 runs against a real corpus the comparison between rule-based scores, expert annotation, and student outcomes is a sharp empirical question rather than a vague invitation to "study pedagogy."