A macro perspective of the perceptions of the education system via topic modelling analysis

Jenny Cifuentes; Fredy Olarte

doi:10.1007/s11042-022-13202-6

. 2022 Jun 10;82(2):1783–1820. doi: 10.1007/s11042-022-13202-6

A macro perspective of the perceptions of the education system via topic modelling analysis

Jenny Cifuentes ^1,^✉, Fredy Olarte ²

PMCID: PMC9186274 PMID: 35702681

Abstract

Education quality has become an important issue and has received considerable attention around the world, especially due to its relevant repercussions on the socio-economical development of society. In recent years, many nations have realized the need for a highly skilled workforce to thrive in the emerging knowledge-based economy. They have consequently adopted strategies to identify the lines of action to improve the education quality. In response to the government’s efforts to improve the education quality in Colombia, this study examines the current perceptions of the education system from the perspective of key local stakeholders. Therefore, we used a survey that contained open-ended questions to collect information about the limitations and difficulties of the education process for several groups of participants. The collected answers were categorized into a variety of topics using a Latent Dirichlet Allocation based model. Consequently, the students’, teachers’ and parents’ answers were analyzed separately to obtain a general landscape of the perceptions of the education system. Evaluation metrics, such as topic coherence, were quantitatively analyzed to assess the modelling performance. In addition, a methodology for the hyper-parameters setting and the final topic labelling was presented. The results suggest that topic modelling strategies are a viable alternative to identify strategic lines of action and to obtain a macro-perspective of the perceptions of the education system.

Keywords: Textual content analysis, Stakeholder perception, Text mining, Topic modelling, Educational system

Introduction

Surveys are a significant research tool that can help to gain insight into a study subject. Specifically, open-ended questions have been considered to be a critical element of surveys because they provide information to clarify ambiguities, to examine attitudes, and to detect spontaneous perceptions, which had not been considered during the survey planning [18]. Consequently, these questions allow the researcher to elicit a topic, even if there is a lack of knowledge in the survey that prevents the adequate formulation of closed questions. Common use cases of open-ended questions to study and analyze citizens’ perceptions about social indicators include surveys on education [13, 19, 24], health care [1, 17, 20], and social service systems [7]. The results of these studies allow the identification of relevant topics that matter to stakeholders, the detection of obstacles to change performance, and they can help us to explain and understand the impact of social reforms and their possible lack of improvement.

Despite the great benefits of using open-ended questions to acquire and analyze information about stakeholders’ perceptions and expectations, their processing is generally associated with a high work-load. The main reason for this is that the traditional approach associated with this task involves the work of analysts who read and manually categorize the whole dataset [18]. This process tends to be tedious and time-consuming. In addition, it can be susceptible to errors when different analysts individually process the data [22].

Several researchers have proposed strategies to explore and analyze text collections. At present, these techniques range from simple methodologies such as frequency counts [21] to more complex Machine Learning (ML) based algorithms [16, 25, 26]. In particular, Topic Modelling (TM) based strategies have emerged as an impressive paradigm to automatically process the semantic characteristics of large textual databases.

TM is oriented to group text instances, considering that each sample can be modeled as a function of latent variables called topics. In this context, a topic is defined by a set of words, which are selected by statistical methods [2]. This approach is generally considered to be an unsupervised algorithm because of the inference processed involved to represent the content of each modeled topic. Applications of this methodology include software engineering, linguistic sciences, social networking, and so on [8, 23].

Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is a text analysis method that is used to represent the topic structure present in a collection of text documents [2]. Using this approach, recent interesting results have included the identification of relevant topics for each coronavirus disease and the exploration of their corresponding research trends from academic papers and news [4], the modelling of key research topics in big data literature [14], or the identification of evolving trends and underlying topics in humanoid robots research by analyzing scientific articles and patents [9]. In education, the use of this approach has not been fully exploited. One of the studies developed in the field is focused on the analysis and visualization of cognitive information that can improve the collaborative learning in classrooms. To this end, the work in [6] implements a Vector Space Model to develop the methodology, which was consequently validated in an experimental case study. The results of this study provide significant elements in the discussion about the student learning process. Recently, the LDA-based approach has also been used to analyze the responses of a teacher self-assessment survey in an Ecuadorian university. As a result of this case study, a set of main strategies that teachers can carry out in their classes with the aim of improving student retention were identified and discussed [3]. An alternative analysis was developed in [15], where the massive open online courses (MOOC) reviews were analyzed using LDA. In the results, the most important characteristics of courses for learners were identified and exposed as a way to improve the overall MOOC learning experience.

This paper presents a complete methodology of collection, pre-processing, topic modelling, and results analysis, based on LDA to represent the categories from several groups of stakeholders of a set of answers to open-ended questions about educational system limitations. As relevant keypoints in the analysis, this approach describes the data collection, the initial exploratory analysis based on a relevant word frequency metric, the topic modelling method, the hyper-parameters setting and the final labelling stages. The survey evaluated in this study is oriented to acquire information about the main expectations and difficulties of the current educational system in Bogota, Colombia. Considering the possible diversity in the ideas from different stakeholders (students, parents and teachers), each group is analyzed separately. Based on this process and the analysis provided by a team of experts in qualitative analysis, the results show the main similarities and differences between the considered groups.

This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the methodology of pre-processing and analysis that is used to process the textual data from the case study under consideration. In addition, the algorithm used for the topic modelling and analysis, and its corresponding approach to set and interpret the hyper-parameters is presented in this section. In Section 3, the results of this case study are detailed. Finally, Section 4 outlines the conclusions of the developed work.

Methodology

In this section, the methodology to model the topics in a set of unstructured textual data is presented. The case study analyzes the answers to open-ended questions that are designed to identify the current expectations and limitations in the educational system of Bogota from different points of view. Figure 1 details every stage of the proposed analysis methodology. During the first stage, the textual data is collected and a pre-processing process is carried out. Once the data is processed, the topic modelling analysis is performed through the implementation and tuning of an LDA-based model. In the final stage, a group of experts in this study area carry out the label identification of each topic. This task is developed using the information of keywords and bigrams from each of the stakeholder groups. It is important to highlight the relevance analysis of the topics identified, with reference to the problem under consideration. The case study studies the topics that are automatically generated to identify the main limitations that stakeholders find in the current educational system.

Constructing the dataset

The open-ended questions for each stakeholder are designed and the data collection is carried out in the first stage. In addition, the generated dataset is pre-processed to extract the main information to be used in the following stage.

Question design

To identify the most significant pedagogical and technical aspects to be improved in the educational process from different point of views, each of the stakeholder groups has been asked a slightly different question formulation, as follows:

(i)
Students: According to your experience as a school/higher education student, describe what characteristics you expect will be changed in your education environment to face the challenges that arise in your life after finishing school/university?
(ii)
Teacher: What characteristics of the pedagogical processes of the classroom, the institution and the educational system would you change to promote integral development during secondary/high education?
(iii)
Parents: What elements in the educational process would you change to impact the student’s lives in a significant way and allow them to face challenges on a personal, family and social level?

These questions have been designed in conjunction with a group of experts in education to focus the formulation on the points of interest for each stakeholder. In addition, a minimum number of words (250) was set to ensure that a collection of topics were addressed in each answer. See the complete set of open-ended questions as well as a sample of the multiple-choice questions included in this study, for each stakeholder, in the Appendix ??.

Text collection and pre-processing

The data that is utilized in this research were obtained from the mission of educators and citizen wisdom, which is a Bogota Secretary of Education initiative that is intended to define educational public policies for the city upto 2038. The mission’s main purpose is to listen to diverse citizen opinions about education. Therefore, several virtual and face-to-face spaces were carried out to collect perceptions and expectations of around one million people. Students, teachers, and parents contributed to create an educational landscape of the entire city.

A set of open-ended questions were designed for each role, and were validated by subject matter experts and psychometrics. Responses were acquired using several mechanisms: a web platform was widely announced, paper-based forms were applied in streets and bus stations, and during new students inscriptions. In addition, a complete educational event, which was promoted by the Secretary of Education, allowed us to collect answers from more than 500000 parents.

To summarize, the data collection stage has allowed the analysis of 669456 answers from parents, 41390 answers from students and 7814 answers from teachers, the information was obtained from different sources. Then, the data has been digitized (if necessary) and subsequently a pre-processing stage was carried out to guarantee the data quality. This phase is particularly important for the analysis of unstructured textual information [10]. Figure 2 summarizes the sequential steps conducted in this process.

First, this stage involves a lowercase normalization, followed by the removal of special characters, punctuation and extra white spaces. The next step involved in the pre-processing was tokenization. The main objective of this task is to break down the text into smaller units, called tokens. The text can be divided by either words, characters or subwords (n-gram characters). As such, the data is tokenized by words, splitting the string elements into sub-strings. Based on this result, those common words in the language that might not add much value to the meaning of the document (stop words) are also removed. Subsequently, a lemmatization process was developed to group the different flexed forms of a word into a basic root word called lemma. In addition, the singular form of the words is obtained.

The final stage is to discard sparse terms that appear less than two times in the whole corpus, as well as those which appear in more than 95% of the documents, without losing relevant relationships inherent in the text instances. This task allows us to reduce the computation time involved in the next phases of the analysis. Likewise, duplicated answers are also removed. Consequently, the final dataset, which will be the input for the topic modelling analysis, is structured with the results of the previous described pre-processing. It is important to note that the textual information that is analyzed in this survey was acquired in Spanish. The pre-processing steps were adequately adapted to the particularities of this language, considering that the implementation of natural language processing strategies (stopwords removal/lemmatization) in Spanish are still under development and some exceptions have not yet been included. Finally, the results presented in this work were translated to English by native speakers.

Topic modelling

After the data is processed, the topic modelling analysis is carried out, based on the following three main steps: the term-document matrix generation, where an initial exploratory analysis is performed; the implementation of the unsupervised algorithm (LDA); and the final setting of the related hyper-parameters.

Term-document matrix generation and exploratory analysis

During the processing and analysis of natural language, the textual instances are characterized by a bag of words, which is computationally represented by a term-document matrix. In this context, the word-document matrix can be considered as a simplified version of the textual corpus, and it is the input of the algorithms that are used to model the corpus topics [11]. It is important to note that the order of the textual instances does not suggest any implicit relation. In fact, during the computation of the word-document matrix, all of the textual elements are randomly mixed to carry out the required statistical processing and analysis. As such, strategies such as the Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) and LDA are based on the assumption of the exchangeability of words and textual instances [12].

Once the word-document matrix is generated, the words and words sequences that are the most frequently used, known as n-grams, are analyzed. Specifically, a uni-gram will be defined with one word and its frequency, while a bi-gram will be a set of two consecutive words and its frequency, and so on. The frequency of these sets of word or words helps to explore the most common concepts in the corpus. This analysis is carried out as a preliminary step to understand the recurrent ideas in the dataset, which will later will support the identification of the topics in the dataset. To consider the importance of each word in relation to other instances from the same corpus, the Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) is computed. To calculate the TF-IDF, it is required to compute the word frequency in a document (in this case, in an answer), and the word frequency in the other documents in the corpus. In other words, the following elements are calculated:

Term Frequency (TF): Frequency of each token or word t, which appears in the document d, tf(t,d) = f(t,d).
Inverse Document Frequency (IDF): the log of number of documents N divided by the number of documents that contain the token df_t (See (1)).
$idf (t, N) = \log \frac{N}{d f_{t}}$ 1

Lastly, the TF-IDF is calculated by multiplying the TF by the IDF:

tfidf = tf (t, d) \cdot idf (t, N)

This metric allows us to provide more relevance to those words that are repeated in more answers instead of words that are repeated a lot in just one answer.

LDA model

To obtain the topics of the set of answers analyzed, a topic modelling strategy using LDA is implemented. LDA is an unsupervised machine learning technique to assess data for patterns or latent topics. It is commonly used in studies that have small observations or unstructured text data, such as the answers of open-ended questions. LDA assigns every word a probabilistic score of the most probable topic it could belong to, where each topic is a mixture of words and each document is a mixture of topic probabilities.

In this context, the model considers the corpus (D = {w₁,w₂,⋯ ,w_M}) as a collection of M documents with N_m words (w = (w₁,w₂,⋯ ,w_N)), with a set of W unique words. Then, each document is represented as a combination of k bag-of-words TOPICS, and each topic is modeled by means of a discrete probability distribution that establishes the probability that each word is present in a specific topic. Figure 3 shows the generation process of the LDA. In this model, α and η are the hyper-parameters for Dirichlet distributions, 𝜃 is the distribution of topics for each instance i, and β is the distribution of words for each topic k. In addition, z describes that a word is sampled in a particular topic, and w represents a simple word.

In this context, the probability distribution over words within a given answer is:

P (w_{i}) = \sum_{j = 1}^{T} P (w_{i} ∣ z_{i} = j) P (z_{i} = j)

where P(z_i = j) is the probability that the j-th topic was sampled for the i-th word, and P(w_i∣z_i = j) is the probability of word w_i of topic j.

Hyperparameter tuning

LDA considers α,η, and k as parameters and randomizes all other values (excluding w). Based on this consideration, the goal is to determine which α and η maximizes the probability of generating the actual corpus by determining the best instance/topic (𝜃) and topic/word (β).

For the LDA implementation, a hyperparameter tuning is applied to set the the number of topics (k), the parameter of document-topic density (α), the parameter for word-topic density (η), and the number of iterations. To measure the model performance and compare, the coherence score c_v will be calculated. This probabilistic measure estimates if the words in the same topic go well together. This means that when the coherence score is high, the words are more closely related, while if it is very low, it contains words that do not occur in the same documents together or are not closely related.

Taking into account the corpus (bag of words associated to the complete answers) of each stakeholder’s group, a series of sensitivity tests is carried out to determine the best hyperparameters for the model. As previously stated, four parameters for the LDA modelling are considered: k, α, η, and the number of iterations. Consequently, the hyperparameter tuning consists of three tests:

(i)
Finding the number of k topics.
(ii)
Finding the best Dirichlet hyperparameter α and η. To calculate α, the following approaches are considered:
- Fixed normalized asymmetric prior of
  $\begin{array}{rcl} α = (\frac{1}{(1 + \sqrt{k})}, \frac{1}{(2 + \sqrt{k})} ...) \to \\ α_{i} = \frac{1}{(i + \sqrt{k})}, i = 1, 2, \dots, k \end{array}$ 4
  where i is the topic index and k is the number of topics.
- Fixed normalized asymmetric prior of 1/number of topics.
- It learns an asymmetric prior from the corpus.
- An array of uniformly distributed symmetric values for all k topics, where values from 0.01 to 1, with a step of 0.3, are considered [5].
For η calculation, three different approaches are involved:
- Scalar for a symmetric prior over topic/word probability,
- It learns an asymmetric prior from the corpus.
- An array of symmetric values for all w words, where values from 0.01 to 1, with a step of 0.3, are included.
By exploring these different alternatives, α and η values with a higher coherence score are selected. In short, from the previous considerations, α defines a Dirichlet distribution hyperparameter that creates the k-dimensional document-topic (𝜃) vectors, while η produces the W-dimensional topic-word (β) vector. In turn, 𝜃 and β act as parameters for categorical distributions, where topics and words are sampled, respectively.
(iii)
Obtaining the optimal number of iterations of the model: Now that the k value is set, and the best value for α and η is calculated, the best amount of iterations is finally selected. The number of iterations controls the repetitions of a particular loop over each document. It is important to set this value high, so we select a range from 50 to 150 iterations. The chosen value provides the best coherence score.

With these steps, the best parameters (k, α, η, and number of iterations) are selected for the modelling to obtain the highest c_v. This in turn generates more meaningful and interpretable topics. Hence, the final step for the topic modelling is to analyze the topics that the model generated, draw conclusions about the theme of each topic and analyze them in terms of its distribution in the dataset.

In addition to this analysis, the intertopic distance is computed to analyze the closeness among the modeled topics. To visualize, first the Jensen-Shannon divergence (JDS) between topics is calculated. Specifically, this metric is a symmetrized and smoothed version of the Kullback-Leibler divergence, which is used to calculate similarities between two distributions. Therefore, the Jensen-Shannon divergence of P and Q is defined as:

JSD (P ∥ Q) = \frac{1}{2} D (P ∥ M) + \frac{1}{2} D (Q ∥ M)

Let $M = \frac{1}{2} (P + Q)$ . The Jensen-Shannon distance is obtained by taking the square root of this divergence. Consequently, taking into account this definition, the probability distributions for each of the topics (β) extracted by the LDA algorithm are analyzed and the distance between each topic is computed. Then, considering these results, a multidimensional scaling is used to project the intertopic distances onto a 2D plane. In this representation, the area of the circle or blob represents the importance of each topic over the entire corpus and the distances between these blobs indicate the closeness or similarity between each topic. The respective centers are defined by the calculated distance between topics, while the circle’s area defines the prevalence of each topic. Hence, during the analysis, the preferred model will be the one that has the least or preferably no overlapping circles, and is spread throughout the graph.

Expert analysis

At this stage, based on the results of the topic modelling algorithm, the analysis of the labels that identify each of the obtained categories was carried out for each stakeholder group. Therefore, an expert team in qualitative analysis has evaluated the results of the keywords and the bigrams per each topic returned in the proposed methodology.

Before analyzing the information of each model, a manual corpus-labeling process was performed. In this task, 5% of answers from parents, and 10% of answers from students and teachers, were randomly analyzed. This approach is focused on a general reading of the chosen answers and the identification of macro-descriptors to which each stakeholder refers in the corresponding answers. This manual labeling provided relevant information to establish criteria for the final process of categories tagging.

Based on these results and the keywords/bigrams information of each model, we have titled each category in case of finding a pattern, which would allow the satisfactorily labeling. As a result of this stage, a logical association of the descriptive keywords to the related category is obtained. It is important to note that no descriptor was assigned to the words groups in case the topics seemed to be incomprehensible.

Experimental results and discussion

Preliminary analysis

After the dataset construction stage was finished and the term-document matrix was generated, a TF-IDF analysis was performed and the relevant terms in each corpus were identified. In the unigrams case (words), the terms that were present in more than 95% of the answers were skipped. The most important words, bigrams and trigrams for each stakeholder’s group are listed in Tables 1, 2, and 3.

Table 1.

Words, bigrams and trigrams with higher TF-IDF in the student group

Words	Bigrams	Trigrams
School	Green zone	Green zone school
Class	Big school	Imagine big school
Learn	Dynamic class	Take care environment
Lifetime	Opportunity study	Teacher understand student
Technology	Continue study	Train study need
Future	Enter university	Outdoor class
University	Environment	Complete resume
Train	Virtual class	Opportunity enter university
Opportunity	Didactic class	Teach beneficial future
Degree	Life quality	Return facetoface class

Words	Bigrams	Trigrams
Process	Pedagogical process	Classroom number students
Develop	Integral develop	Promote integral develop
Learn	Education system	Teach learn process
Classroom	Number student	Classroom pedagogical process
Pedagogical	Develop skill	Read write process
Institution	Pedagogical process	Decrease number student
Family	Learn process	Specialize process area
Technology	Significant learn	Few number student
Evaluation	Technology tool	Socio emotional skill
Integral	Didactic material	Reinforce learning process

Words	Bigrams	Trigrams
Life	Life project	Didactic student interest
Child	Develop skill	Student interest tedium
Develop	Didactic student	Tedium enjoy learn
Value	Student interest	Personal family social
Learn	Enjoy learn	Develop life project
Future	Tedium enjoy	Impact life student
Skill	Daily life	Level personal life
Respect	Value respect	Take care environment
Family	Personal level	Challenge personal level
Personal	Family social	Value ethical moral

Number	Topic	Keywords	Bigrams with higher frequency
1	Need language skills	Future, study, language, teach, degree, english, serve, need, course, practice	Opportunity study, serve future, after school, study future, teach language, study degree, buy house, learn language, language learn, english language
2	Preparation for a real world	Life, student, teach, prepare, work, focus, learn, help, confront, real	Daily life, after school, real life, confront life, work life, life teach, school teach, project life, life school, real world
3	Didactic strategies	Activity, child, learn, ludic, train, understand, student, teacher, didactic, school	Ludic activity, recreation activity, didactic activity, after school, teacher explain, student activity, school activity, train learn, understand student, outofclass activity
4	Access higher education	Student, high, knowledge, access, opportunity, quality, important, social, institution, university	Enter university, access high, after school, enter high, high free, vocational guidance, opportunity access, access university, improve quality, young child
5	Social relation at school	School, teacher, learn, change, classmate, happy, big, classroom, friend ,share	Big school, imagine school, change school, share classmate, school learn, happy school, classmate teacher, big classroom, share friends, share student
6	Improvement of facilities	Improve, school, big, space, green, area, learn, play, help, zone	Green area, big school, school improve, imagine school, school space, improve facility, college area, big area, big space, green zone
7	Virtual classes	Class, dynamic, subject, virtual, didactic, life, fear, facetoface, homework, internet	Dynamic class, didactic class, virtual class, facetoface class, homework assign, fear class, school class,internet class, access internet, online class
8	Use of technology	Technology, use, education, implement, tool, teach, content, system, digital, screen	Technology tool, education system, use technology, implement technology, digital screen, advance technology, school technology, implement technology, digital tool, technology equity

Number	Topic	Keywords	Bigrams with higher frequency
1	Learning process	Learn, child, improve, develop, significant, process, knowledge, train, teach, think	Significant learn, learn process, comprehensive teach, critical think, learn environment, teach process, improve process, ludic activity, develop skill, learn experience
2	Pedagogical strategies at classroom	Process, student, teacher, pedagogical, develop, child, train, initial, education, classroom	Pedagogical process, education system, develop pedagogical, pedagogical classroom, develop process, education process, develop process, teacher train, pedagogical skill, pedagogical strategies
3	Reduction of the number of students	Student, classroom, teacher, child, initial, quantity, material, number, process, learn	Student classroom, student quantity, student number, decrease quantity, teacher support, reduce number, maximum student, classroom class, child classroom, teacher specialize
4	Use of technology	Technology, student, process, material, knowledge, reality, teacher, classroom, tool, system	Technology tool, study plan, educational system, develop ability, technology resource, implementation tool, student technology, develop knowledge, technology material, integrate technology
5	Family involvement	Process, student, family, parent, class, improve, education, train, evaluation, relation	Parent family, family process, quantitative evaluation, learn process, involve parent, train process, improve process, education community, evaluation process, parent relation
6	Integral development	Develop, ability, child, play, process, read, institution, integral, write, skill	Develop skill, develop comprehensive, read write, comprehensive child, develop competence, read process, learn play, integral develop, integral skill, play art
7	emotional intelligence	Teacher, evaluation, student, develop, social, regulate, manage, emotion, child, intelligence	Emotion intelligence, hourly intensity, manage emotion, multiple intelligence, train evaluation, xxi century, emotion partner, social emotion, regulate emotion, social relation

Number	Topic	Keywords	Bigrams with higher frequency
1	Preparation for a real world	Student, teach, life, project, problem, real, make, decision, learn, future	Life project, make decision, student future, real life, serve life, decision life, teach life, prepare real, real problem, problem solve
2	Access high education	Opportunity, school, study, university, after, life, future, career, child, degree	After school, opportunity study, work life, get degree, professional career, improve opportunity, access university, want study, give opportunity
3	Instruction in values	Value, respect, teach, life, child, responsibility, base, principle, love, student	Value respect, value principle, teach value, principle value, base value, love respect, respect responsibility, value respect, respect tolerance, right duty
4	Use of technology	Student, learn, child, improve, educational, tool, teach, develop, technology, need	Need tool, technology tool, student learn, provide tool, child learn, education system, technology interest
5	Social interaction	Personal, social, level, student, family, relation, life, develop, individual, child	Personal level, social family, social interaction, social personal, personal development, achieve goal, personal life, social individual, social relation, social skill
6	Family involvement	Student, parent, teacher, support, school, child, family, scholar, relative, relation	Family social, parent teacher, student teacher, parent relation, parent scholar, support parent, support family, relation father, relative relation, family school
7	Virtual classes	Classroom, virtual, child, facetoface, learn, teach, online, train, technology, access	Virtual class, facetoface class, environment, virtual facetoface, child learn, internet access, return class, technology internet, online courses, access technology
8	Theory and practice at the classroom	Student, practice, dynamic, learn, class, theory, relation, child, application, teach	Free expression, dynamic class, theory practice, relation practice, want study, dynamic learn, application theory, teach practice, class practice, active learn
9	Awakening students interest	Life, student, learn, didactic, confront, tedium, interest, enjoy, amuse, emphasis	Enjoy learn, student interest, place emphasis, educate entertain, amuse learn, serious didactic, tedium enjoy, daily life, didactic class, awaken interest
10	Development of talents and skills	Develop, student, skill, child, activity, talent, life, ability, ludic, improve	Develop skill, allow develop, skill student, improve skill, develop ability, practice talent, develop talent, ludic activity, improve talent, talent creativity

Number	Initial label	Final label
1	Need language skills	Need for a foreign language proficiency
2	Preparation for a real world	Development of life skills and competencies
3	Didactic strategies	Change of pedagogical methodologies for a significant learning
4	Access to higher education	Wider coverage and access to higher education
5	Social relation at school	Strategies to improve school coexistence
6	Improvement of facilities	Investment and modification in the infrastructure and equipping of the school
7	Virtual classes	Online classes and access limitations
8	Use of technology	Access and use of new technologies in education

Number	Initial Label	Final Label
1	Learning process	More flexible curricular changes appropriate to the different learning processes of each student
2	Pedagogical strategies at classroom	Change of pedagogical methodologies for a significant learning
3	Reduction of the number of students	Changes in group sizes to ensure quality education
4	Use of technology	Access and use of new technologies in education
5	Family involvement	Greater interaction of the family in the educational process
6	Integral development	Development of skills and competencies for the comprehensive and integral training of students
7	Emotional intelligence	Education that integrates multiple intelligences

Categoría	Descriptores
Inversión y modificación en la infraestructura y dotación de colegios	Construcción de laboratorios. Construcción y/o mejora de bibliotecas. Mejora de ludotecas. Creación de zonas verdes y huertas. Creación, dotación y/o ampliación de zonas deportivas (patios, canchas, otros espacios para deportes). Creación y/o dotación de zonas de recreación y con fines culturales. Mejora de las condiciones de aseo de los baños. Implementación de tecnologías en los salones. Creación y/o dotación de comedores
Cambio de metodologías pedagógicas para un aprendizaje (una enseñanza) significativo	Aprendizaje - enseñanza significativa. Desarrollo de actividades pedagógicas. Clases prácticas. Educación contextualizada. Educación personalizada. Metodologias creativas para incrementar la motivación. Reducción de trabajos escolares. Desarrollo de actividades didácticas. Modificación metodologías pedagógicas
Mayor cobertura y acceso a la educación superior	Menor costo de la educación superior. Simulacros de exámenes de acceso de las universidades publicas. Difusión de la información de becas y oportunidades de acceso a la educación superior. Prioridad de acceso para estratos 1 y 2. Exámenes gratuitos de acceso a las universidades públicas. Convenios para acceder a la educación superior directamente desde el colegio
Clases remotas y limitaciones de acceso	No tener internet. No tener computador. Difícil conexión. No tener más clases virtuales. Tener clases semipresenciales
Acceso y uso de las tecnologías en la educación	Más uso de tecnologías. Mayor involucramiento de la tecnología en la educación
Desarrollo de habilidades y competencias para la vida	Aprendizajes que permitan resolver problemas de la vida real. Inclusión de cursos técnicos. Educación para el futuro. Educación que fomente el pensamiento critico. Educación en habilidades para la vida laboral: presentación de entrevistas, construcción de la hoja de vida. Educación sexual. Educación emocional: salud mental (prevención de ansiedad, depresión). conocimiento para la vida cotidiana (impuestos, política y realidades locales, nacionales y globales). Impacto de las acciones diarias en el cambio climático (aprender a reciclar). Manejo de la vida financiera
Necesidad de dominio de un idioma extranjero	Formación en un segundo idioma. Aprender otros idiomas además de inglés. Colegios bilingües. Mayor exigencia en las materias de segunda lengua
Estrategias para mejorar la convivencia escolar	Espacios lúdicos que refuercen la buena convivencia. Mejora en las convivencia entre estudiantes. Mitigar acciones de violencia escolar y bullying. Mayor atención por parte de los docentes a peleas, bullying y conflictos entre los estudiantes. Reducir la indisciplina. Aumento de la seguridad y prevención de robos. Respetar el libre desarrollo de la personalidad. Disminuir la discriminación (raza, género, clase social, etc)

Categoría	Descriptores
Mayor interacción de la familia en el proceso educativo	Escuela de padres (actividades) lúdicas, inducciones pedagógicas para fortalecer los procesos pedagógicos. Talleres y capacitaciones a los padres de familia. Mayor interacción entre el docente y los padres. Participación de la comunidad educativa. Mayor interacción y compromiso entre los padres y la comunidad educativa. Participación de la familia en la formación. Mayor compromiso e integración de los padres en la educación
Acceso y uso de nuevas tecnologías en la educación	Contar con recursos tecnológicos. Uso y manejo de tableros inteligentes. Tener salas de tecnología. Acceso a computadores, internet etc. Uso de herramientas interactivas para las clases. Capacitación de herramientas tecnológicas. Recursos tecnológicos para mejorar la eficiencia y la productividad en el aula
Educación que integra inteligencias múltiples	Inteligencia emocional: comunicación asertiva, autonomía, confianza. Manejo del dinero. Hábitos saludables
Desarrollo de habilidades y competencias para la formación completa e integral de los estudiantes	Pensamiento crítico (habilidades críticas, lectura crítica, actitud crítica). Formación en educación física (corporal y psicomotriz). Formación humanística. Desarrollo de habilidades artísticas y/o que fomenten la creatividad
Cambios curriculares más flexibles y adecuados a los diferentes procesos de aprendizaje de cada alumno	Currículo participativo por todos los agentes, Currículo acorde a las necesidades del contexto del país. Innovación y flexibilidad curricular, transversales e integrales en el proceso de enseñanza y aprendizaje
Cambios en las metodologías pedagógicas para un aprendizaje significativo	Metodologías que incluyan la implementación de proyectos, utilizar estrategias y metodologías lúdico-didácticas que motiven al estudiante. Buscar aplicar los conocimientos del estudiante en su cotidianidad y en contextos específicos. Desarrollar autonomía en el estudiante. Metodologías más aplicadas basadas en proyectos y problemas
Cambios en el tamaño de los grupos para asegurar calidad educativa	Clases de más de 30 estudiantes. Grupos de aprendizaje más pequeños. Grupos muy grandes con aprendizaje menos efectivo. Control de las dimensiones de los grupos

Categoría	Descriptores
Mayor interacción de la familia en el proceso educativo	Generar responsabilidad desde los hogares. Configurar asociación de padres (capacitación y guías a los padres). Tener mucho acompañamiento de parte de los padres. Hacer más seguimiento y supervisión a los padres en el proceso educativo. Educar a los padres para que les enseñen valores a sus hijos. Generar compromiso de los padres para una mejor comprensión en lo educativo y lo familiar. Comunicación abierta padre-docente
Formación en valores	Valores como: espiritualidad, cuidado, respeto, honestidad, valoración del medio ambiente, ética, normas de comportamiento, valores en convivencia y responsabilidad
Desarrollo de habilidades y competencias para la vida	Cambios a una educación más significativa y acorde a las necesidades y desafíos de la vida real. Currículos ajustados a las necesidades actuales del país (contenidos teorícos-prácticos). Conocimiento en clases de finanzas personales para que desarrollen sus propias empresas (emprendimiento)- educación laboral (trámites administrativos necesarios en la vida adulta: sacar citas, sacar tarjetas credito y debito, entre otros). Tener una educacion enfocada a la vida cotidiana, conociendo mas su pais (historia nacional y del mundo); Brindar herramientas para afrontar un cargo laboral. Tener preparación en planes económicos para hacer sus propias empresas
Acceso y uso de nuevas tecnologías en educación	Mayor uso de las tecnologías en la forma de transmitir conocimiento. Acceso equitativo a la tecnología. Más sesiones educativas en el uso de herramientas tecnológicas
Educación enfocada en la práctica del conocimiento teórico	metodologías que impliquen mayor práctica y menos contenido. Clases prácticas. Desarrollo de laboratorios. Aprender haciendo. Búsqueda y enseñanza de artes y oficios
Cambios en la educación tradicional	desarrollar autonomía en el estudiante. Metodologías personalizadas (se tiene en cuenta las preferencias del estudiante). Transmisión de conocimientos de forma atractiva. Educación más interactiva. Metodologías que estimulen a los estudiantes a aprender. Fomentar la lectura y desarrollo del pensamiento crítico
Enseñanza de habilidades interpersonales	resilencia. Control de emociones. Comunicación asertiva. Resolución de conflictos. Tener clases de educación sexual (junto con estas se pueden tratar temas de planificación tanto para hombre como para mujer)
Formación vocacional enfocada en talentos-hobbies, orientada al proyecto de vida	enseñar cómo hacer un proyecto de vida. Tener un enfoque hacia temas que le sirvan a los niños para desarrollarse en un futuro. Elaborar proyectos que los lleven a nuevos desafíos. Contenidos y actividades enfocados en los intereses, aptitudes y talentos de cada estudiante. Proyectos en torno a diferentes ocupaciones. Elección de materias extracurriculares dependiendo de los intereses. Implementación en orientación vocacional. Desarrollo de los talentos y cualidades para potencializar las fortalezas de los estudiantes
Mayor cobertura y acceso a la educación superior	Acceso gratuito a la educación superior. Igualdad de oportunidades de acceder a educación superior. Tener educación superior pública y privada con igualdad de condiciones
Clases Virtuales y limitaciones de acceso	acceso a herramientas para clases virtuales. Limitaciones de internet como recurso educativo. Incidencia negativa de las clases virtuales en la socialización. Carencia de estructura pedagógica en clases virtuales. Necesidad de retomar clases presenciales

Stakeholder	α	η	Number iterations
Students	0.61	0.91	90
Teachers	0.31	0.01	90
Parents	0.01	0.91	70

Category	Descriptors
Investment and modification in the infrastructure and equipping of the school	Construction of laboratories. Construction and/or improvement of libraries. Improvement of toy libraries. Creation of green areas and vegetable gardens. Creation, equipment and/or expansion of sports areas (playgrounds, courts, other spaces for sports). Creation and/or equipment of recreation and cultural areas. Improvement of toilet cleaning conditions. Implementation of technologies in classrooms. Creation and/or equipment of school canteens
Change of pedagogical methodologies for a significant learning	Significant learning - teaching. Development of pedagogical activities. Practical classes. Contextualized education. Personalized education. Creative methodologies to increase motivation. Reduction of home works. Development of didactic activities. Modification of pedagogical methodologies. Development of didactic activities. Modification of teaching methodologies
Wider coverage and access to higher education	Lower cost of higher education;. Entrance exams drills for public universities. Dissemination of information on scholarships and opportunities for access to higher education. Priority access for strata 1 and 2. Free entrance exams to public universities. Agreements to access higher education directly from school
Online classes and access limitations	No internet. No computer. Difficult connection. No more virtual classes. Semi face-to-face classes
Access and use of new technologies in education	Increased use of technologies. Increased involvement of technology in education
Development of life skills and competencies	Learning to solve real life problems. Inclusion of technical courses. Education for the future. Education that encourages critical thinking. Education in life skills: interviewing, completing a resume. Sex education. Emotional education: mental health (prevention of anxiety, depression). Life skills education (taxes, politics, local, national and global realities). Impact of daily actions on climate change (learning to recycle). Financial life management
Need for a foreign language proficiency	Second language training. Learning languages other than English. Bilingual schools. Higher demands in second language courses
Strategies to improve school coexistence	Playful spaces that reinforce good coexistence. Improve coexistence among students. Mitigate actions of school violence and bullying. Greater attention by teachers to fights, bullying and conflicts among students. Reduce indiscipline. Increase security and prevent theft. Respect the free development of personality. Reduce discrimination (race, gender, social class, etc.)

Category	Descriptors
Greater interaction of the family in the educational process	Parents’ association (recreational activities, pedagogical inductions to strengthen the pedagogical processes). Workshops and training for parents. Greater interaction between the teacher and parents. Participation of the educational community. Greater interaction and commitment between parents and the educational community. Participation of the family in training. Greater commitment and integration of parents in education
Access to and use of new technologies in education	Having technological resources. Use and management of smart boards. Having technology rooms. Access to computers, internet, etc. Use of interactive tools for classes. Training on technological tools. Technology resources to improve efficiency and productivity in the classroom
Education that integrates multiple intelligence	Emotional intelligence: assertive communication, autonomy, confidence; money management. Healthy habits
Development of skills and competencies for the comprehensive and integral training of students	Critical thinking (critical skills, critical reading, critical attitude). Physical education training (corporal and psychomotor). Humanistic training. Development of artistic skills and/or skills that encourage creativity
More flexible curricular changes appropriate to the different learning processes of each student	Curriculum participative by all agents. Curriculum according to the needs of the country’s context. Curricular innovation and flexibility. Transversal and integral curriculum in teaching and learning process
Change of pedagogical methodologies for a significant learning	Methodologies that include the implementation of projects, use recreational-didactic strategies and methodologies that motivate the student seeking to apply the students’ knowledge in their daily lives and in specific contexts and developing autonomy in the student. Personalized methods. More applied methodologies based on projects and problems
Changes in class size to ensure educational quality	Class sizes of more than 30 students. Smaller learning groups. Very large groups with less effective learning. Control of class sizes

Category	Descriptors
Greater interaction of the family in the educational process	Generating responsibility from home. Forming a parents’ association (training and guidance to parents). Having a lot of accompaniment from parents. More follow-up and supervision of parents in the educational process. Educating parents to teach values to their children. Generating commitment from parents for a better understanding of the educational and family aspects. Open communication between parents and teachers
Instruction in Values	Values such as spirituality, care, respect, honesty, valuing the environment, ethics, codes of conduct, values in coexistence and responsibility
Development of skills and competencies for life	Changes to a more meaningful education according to the needs and challenges of real life. Curricula adjusted to the current needs of the country (theoretical-practical contents). Knowledge in personal finance classes to develop their own companies (entrepreneurship) - labour education (necessary administrative procedures in adult life: make appointments, get credit and debit cards, among others). Having an education focused on daily life, knowing more about your country (national and world history). Tools to face a job position. Preparation in economic plans to start their own companies
Access and use of new technologies in education	Greater use of technologies to transmit knowledge. Equitable access to technology. More educational sessions on the use of technological tools
Education focused on the practice of theoretical knowledge	Methodologies involving more practice and less content. Practical classes. Laboratory development. Learning-by-doing. Search and teaching of arts and crafts
Changes in the traditional education	Developing student autonomy. Personalized methodologies (student preferences are taken into account). Knowledge transmission in an attractive way. More interactive education. Methodologies that encourage students to learn. Encourage reading and development of critical thinking
Teaching interpersonal skills	resilience. emotion management. assertive communication. conflict resolution. Sex education classes (along with these, family planning issues for both men and women)
Vocational training focused on talents-hobbies, oriented to the life projects	Teaching how to make a life project. Focusing on topics that will help children to develop in the future. Elaboration of projects that will lead them to new challenges. Contents and activities focused on the interests, aptitudes and talents of each student. Projects around different occupations. Choice of extracurricular subjects depending on the interests. Implementation of vocational guidance. Development of talents and qualities to enhance the strengths of students
Wider coverage and access to higher education	Free access to higher education. Equal opportunity to access higher education. Equal access to public and private higher education. Quality higher education for all
Online classes and access limitations	Access to tools for virtual classes. Limitations of the internet as an educational resource. Negative impact of virtual classes on socialization. Lack of pedagogical structure in virtual classes. Need to return to face-to-face classes

PERMALINK

A macro perspective of the perceptions of the education system via topic modelling analysis

Jenny Cifuentes

Fredy Olarte

Abstract

Introduction

Methodology

Fig. 1.

Constructing the dataset

Question design

Text collection and pre-processing

Fig. 2.

Topic modelling

Term-document matrix generation and exploratory analysis

LDA model

Fig. 3.

Hyperparameter tuning

Expert analysis

Experimental results and discussion

Preliminary analysis

Table 1.

Table 2.

Table 3.

Topic modelling results

Fig. 4.

Fig. 5.

Table 4.

Table 5.

Table 6.

Table 7.

Fig. 6.

Expert analysis results

Table 8.

Table 9.

Table 10.

Conclusions

Acknowledgements

Appendix A: Full questionnaire

A.1 Spanish version

A.1.1 Students

Multiple-choice questions

Open-ended questions

A.1.2.Teachers

Multiple-choice questions

Open-ended questions

A.1.3 Parents

Multiple-choice questions

Open-ended questions

A.2 English Version

A.2.1 Students

Multiple-choice questions

Open-ended questions

A.2.2 Teachers

Multiple-choice questions

Open-ended questions

A.2.3 Parents

Multiple-choice questions

Open-ended questions

Appendix B: Expert Analysis: Categories and Descriptors from the Manual Categorization

B.1 Spanish Version

B.1.1 Students

Table 11.

B.1.2 Teachers

Table 12.

B.1.3 Parents

Table 13.

B.2 English Version

B.2.1 Students

Table 14.

B.2.2 Teachers

Table 15.

B.2.3 Parents

Table 16.

Funding

Declarations

Competing interests

Footnotes

Contributor Information

References

ACTIONS