Open-ended responses to surveys can be highly beneficial to higher education institutions, providing clarity and context that quantitative data can sometimes lack. However, analyzing open-ended responses typically takes time and manpower most institutional assessment offices do not have to spare. This study focused on finding a potential solution…

This case study examines employee attrition, its detrimental effects on businesses, and the potential of data analytics to address this challenge. By employing Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a sophisticated NLP technique, we delve into the underlying reasons for employee departures. Additionally, we explore using RapidMiner to develop…

Opioid use is common among Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) beneficiaries, who account for a disproportionate share of opioid-related hospitalizations and mortality in the United States. However, little is known about the prevalence of opioid use prior to SSDI enrollment. Understanding when opioid use is established and how it…

The last decade witnessed a spectacular rise in the volume of available textual data. With this new abundance came the question of how to analyze it. In the social sciences, scholars mostly resorted to two well-established approaches, human annotation on sampled data on the one hand (either performed by the researcher, or outsourced to…

Constructing a consensus problem space from extensive qualitative data for an ill-structured real-life problem and expressing the result to a broader audience is challenging. To effectively communicate a complex problem space, visualization of that problem space must elucidate inter-causal relationships among the problem variables. In this…

This study analyzed the influence of rhetoric in the endorsement text on the willingness of the crowd to participate in citizen science projects. Four categories of endorsers were studied: professors, students, industrial researchers, and amateur researchers. Using 1243 endorsement texts from 543 citizen science projects as the corpus, the effects…

Recent advances in publicly available natural language processors (NLP) may enhance the efficiency of analyzing student short-answer responses in physics education research (PER). We train a state-of-the-art NLP, IBM's Watson, and test its agreement with human coders using two different studies that gathered text responses in which students…

Technological tools, like virtual assistants (aka chatbots), have been ubiquitous in people's day to day. The challenge becomes how educators leverage digital omnipresence to benefit the learning environment. Using a curated chatbot allows educators to reach more students with instructor-approved information, particularly in large classrooms.…

Learning analytics (LA) involves the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, aiming to understand and optimize both the learning process and the environments in which it occurs. Among many themes that the LA community considers, natural language processing (NLP) algorithms have been widely…

A model that maps the requisite skills, or knowledge components, to the contents of an online course is necessary to implement many adaptive learning technologies. However, developing a skill model and tagging courseware contents with individual skills can be expensive and error prone. We propose a technology to automatically identify latent…

This study explores the integration of generative artificial intelligence (AI) into qualitative research within a higher education context. Through a collaborative self-study, a doctoral candidate and their dissertation supervisor examined the application of Google's Gemini 1.5 to analyze interview data from a dissertation of practice (DiP)…

Educators and researchers have analyzed various image data acquired from teaching and learning, such as images of learning materials, classroom dynamics, students' drawings, etc. However, this approach is labour-intensive and time-consuming, limiting its scalability and efficiency. The recent development in the Visual Question Answering (VQA)…

Encouraging teachers to reflect on their instructional practices and course design has been shown to be an effective means of improving instruction and student learning. However, the process of encouraging reflection is difficult; reflection requires quality data, thoughtful analysis, and contextualized interpretation. Because of this, research on…

Advances in Information Technology (IT) and computer science have without a doubt had a significant impact on our daily lives. The past few decades have witnessed the advancement of IT enabled processes in generating actionable insights in various fields, encouraging research based applications of modern Data Science methods. Among many other…

Surveys have long been used in physics education research to understand student reasoning and inform course improvements. However, to make analysis of large sets of responses practical, most surveys use a closed-response format with a small set of potential responses. Open-ended formats, such as written free response, can provide deeper insights…