Linking Real-World Experiences with Course Contents: A Text Mining Approach Toward Effective “There and Back Again”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.58459/icce.2024.4881Abstract
In higher education, teachers sometimes urge students to apply what they have learned during class to real-life situations. However, interweaving real-world events with class activities, or the There and Back Again process, entails difficulty in relating dynamic experiences to the course contents. This study attempted to link both sides using text mining techniques on course data from a Japanese university. We extracted key phrases from four weekly assignments featuring students' real-world explorations. Then we measured the semantic similarity between each key phrase and each course content and linked the pairs with high similarity. For the linked pairs, we conducted data analyses. We also held a semi-structured interview with a course teacher regarding the interpretability of visualized data and its practical use. Consequently, we confirmed: 1) the links between the course contents and students' key phrases appeared differently in the weekly assignments, 2) notable links between specific course contents and key phrases were identified, and 3) the visualized data contained valuable insights for the teacher, but more fine-grained linking and integrated presentations were required. Despite several limitations, the results support the potential utilization of this approach for effective data-enhanced experiential learning.