Sentiment analysis in education research: a review of journal publications

ABSTRACT

Sentiment analysis (SA) is widespread across all fields and has become one of the most active topics in education research, and there is a growing body of papers published. So far, however, there has been little discussion about comprehensive literature reviews in SA in education. Therefore, this study aims to review the high-qualified scientific literature of SA in education and reveals the future research prospects of SA based on the reviewed papers. After systematically searching five online bibliographic databases, 41 relevant articles were located and included in the study. Results show that most studies focus on higher education, and more studies adopt smaller datasets. SA is actively employed in the learning domain of engineering and technology, and teachers/educators are the primary stakeholders considered of studies. Further, utilizing hybrid approaches for SA research is predominant, more studies have refined the granularity of sentiment categories in education. Finally, four major SA research topics, including designing SA methods/systems, investigating learners’ satisfaction/attitude/concerned topics, evaluating teachers’ teaching performance as well as examining the relationship among sentiment, behavior, performance, and achievement, were identified and discussed deeply. Accordingly, several implications and research issues for SA in education research are provided.

Keywords:

• Sentiment analysis
• online learning
• education
• emotions
• literature review

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities in China (Innovation Funding Project) [grant number 2019CXZZ037].

Notes on contributors

Jin Zhou

Jin Zhou is currently working toward the PhD degree in education technology in School of Educational Information Technology, Central China Normal University, China. His research interests are sentiment analysis and learning behavior analysis. He is the corresponding author.

Jun-min Ye

Jun-min Ye is a professor in School of Computer, Central China Normal University (CCNU). His research has been funded by National Social Science Foundation. He has led many national researches and technological projects and made contributions in technology development and higher education sectors. His research interests include learning analytics and educational data mining and sentiment analysis in online learning environment.