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A survey of the literature: how scholars use text mining in Educational Studies?

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Abstract

The massive amount of text related to education provides rich information to support education in many aspects. In the meantime, the vast yet increasing volume of text makes it impossible to analyze manually. Text mining is a powerful tool to automatically analyze large-scaled texts and generate insights from the texts. However, many educational scholars are not fully aware of whether text mining is useful and how to use it in their studies. To address this problem, we reviewed the literature to examine the educational research that used text mining techniques. Specifically, we proposed an educational text mining workflow and focused on identifying the articles’ bibliographic information, research methodologies, and applications in alignment with the workflow. We selected 161 articles published in educational journals from 2015 to 2020. We find that text mining is becoming more popular and essential in educational research. The conclusion is that we can employ three steps (text source selection, text mining techniques application, and educational information discovery) to use text mining in educational studies. We also summarize different options in each step in this paper. Our work should help educational scholars better understand educational text mining and provide support information for future research in text mining for educational contexts.

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  1. Department of Learning Technologies, University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA

    Junhe Yang,  Kinshuk & Yunjo An

  2. Department of Learning Technologies, University of North Texas, 3940 N. Elm St., Suite G150, UNT College of Information, Denton, TX, 76207, USA

    Junhe Yang

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Yang, J., Kinshuk & An, Y. A survey of the literature: how scholars use text mining in Educational Studies?. Educ Inf Technol 28, 2071–2090 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-022-11193-3

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