Abstract

We have used an unsupervised machine learning method called Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to thematically analyze all papers published in the Physics Education Research Conference Proceedings between 2001 and 2018. By looking at co-occurrences of words across the data corpus, this technique has allowed us to identify ten distinct themes or "topics" that have seen varying levels of prevalence in Physics Education Research (PER) over time and to rate the distribution of these topics within each paper. Our analysis suggests that although all identified topics have seen sustained interest over time, PER has also seen several waves of increased interest in certain topics, beginning with initial interest in qualitative, theory-building studies of student understanding, which has given way to a focus on problem solving in the late 2010s. Since 2010 the field has seen a shift towards more sociocultural views of teaching and learning with a particular focus on communities of practice, student identities, and institutional change. Based on these results, we suggest that unsupervised text analysis techniques like LDA may hold promise for providing quantitative, independent, and replicable analyses of educational research literature.

Highlights

  • THE CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES OF A GROWING LITERATURE BASEThere is an overwhelming amount of scientific research literature, even in fields as relatively young as physics education research (PER)

  • The Physics Education Research Conference (PERC) Proceedings have published over 1300 papers since 2001

  • This rating of prevalence within the paper can be thought of as a kind of “percent match” between the paper and topic—a value of 0.9 means that the model rated the paper in question as being 90% composed of that topic, with the remaining 10% being a mixture across all other topics

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Summary

Introduction

THE CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES OF A GROWING LITERATURE BASEThere is an overwhelming amount of scientific research literature, even in fields as relatively young as physics education research (PER). The Physics Education Research Conference (PERC) Proceedings have published over 1300 papers since 2001. Journals like The Physics Teacher and The American Journal of Physics have published many thousands of articles on education, starting in 1963 and 1933, respectively. There are almost certainly thousands more relevant articles in the science education and general education research literature. This magnitude of literature presents a significant challenge for researchers in that they will never have enough time to read every new article that comes out.

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