Investigating teachers’ understanding through topic modeling: a promising approach to studying teachers’ knowledge
Investigating teachers’ understanding through topic modeling: a promising approach to studying teachers’ knowledge
复制标题
DOI：
10.1007/s10857-021-09529-w
复制
发表时间：
2022-01
影响因子：
2.1
通讯作者：
Y. Copur-Gencturk;Hye-Jeong Choi;Alan Cohen
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Y. Copur-Gencturk;Hye-Jeong Choi;Alan Cohen
大规模检查教师的知识涉及解决实质性的测量和后勤问题；因此，现有的教师知识评估主要由选择回答项目组成，因为它们易于评分。尽管开放式的回答可以获得对教师思维的更复杂的理解，并提供进一步的见解，但对这些回答进行评分既昂贵又耗时，这限制了它们在大规模研究中的应用。在这项研究中，我们调查了一种新的统计方法，主题建模，是否可以用来给教师的开放式回答打分，如果可以的话，这些分数是否会捕捉到教师理解的细微差别。为了验证这一假设，我们使用主题建模来分析教师对比例推理任务的反应，并检查通过该方法确定的主题与通过对相同数据进行单独定性分析确定的类别之间的关联，以及教师在比例和比例关系度量上的表现。我们的研究结果表明，主题建模似乎捕捉到了教师反应的细微差别，而这些细微差别区分了教师在同一概念上的表现。本文讨论了本研究对教育研究的启示。
Examining teachers’ knowledge on a large scale involves addressing substantial measurement and logistical issues; thus, existing teacher knowledge assessments have mainly consisted of selected-response items because of their ease of scoring. Although open-ended responses could capture a more complex understanding of and provide further insights into teachers’ thinking, scoring these responses is expensive and time consuming, which limits their use in large-scale studies. In this study, we investigated whether a novel statistical approach, topic modeling, could be used to score teachers’ open-ended responses and if so, whether these scores would capture nuances of teachers’ understanding. To test this hypothesis, we used topic modeling to analyze teachers’ responses to a proportional reasoning task and examined the associations of the topics identified through this method with categories identified by a separate qualitative analysis of the same data as well as teachers’ performance on a measure of ratios and proportional relationships. Our findings suggest that topic modeling seemed to capture nuances of teachers’ responses and that such nuances differentiated teachers’ performance on the same concept. We discuss the implications of this study for education research.