Researching Education

People might wonder what was going on during the 2021 academic year in 4th grade U.S. English language arts/reading (ELAR) classrooms, as this was a time when students were learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Generally speaking, the time was considered one of disruption in education, when students and teachers alike faced challenges to both the art and science of teaching and learning (Gray, Powell-Smith, and Good, 2023).  Fortunately, the Progress in International Readling Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2021 survey captured data from participating teachers, and the world is able to get somewhat of a snapshot of what teachers were doing on the side of teaching in the field. This report uses the 2021 weighted survey data to draw some basic comparisons and conclusions between teachers that were mostly literature majors in their teaching preparation, and teachers that were mostly pedagogy majors in their teaching preparation. The PIRLS study limits the discourse of what we can talk abou...

 In my pursuit of self learning the R programming language, I have mostly mastered the art of reading through CRAN documentation of R libraries as they are published. I have gone through everything from mediocre to very well documented sheets and anything in between. I am sharing one example of a very good function that was well documented in the 'survey' library by Dr. Thomas Lumley that for some reason I could not process and make work with my data initially. No finger pointing or anything like that here. It was merely my brain not readily able to wrap around the idea that the function passed another function in its arguments.  fig1: the  svyby function in the 'survey' library by Thomas Lumley filled in with variables for my study Readers familiar with base R will be reminded of another function that works similarly called the aggregate  function, which is mirrored by the work of the svyby function, in that both call on data and both call on a function toward...

As large language models (LLMs) have become all the rage recently, we can look to small scale modeling again as a useful tool to researchers in the field with strictly defined research questions that limit the use of language parsing and modeling to the bi term topic modeling procedure. In this blog post I discuss the procedure for bi-term topic modeling (BTM) in the R programming language. One indication of when to use the procedure is when there is short text with a large "n" to be parsed. An example of this is using it on twitter applications, and related social media postings. To be sure, such applications of text are becoming harder to harvest from online, but secondary data sources can still yield insightful information, and there are other uses for the BTM outside of twitter that can bring insights into short text, such as from open ended questions in surveys.   Yan et al. (2013) have suggested that the procedure of BTM with its Gibbs sampling procedure handles sho...

One of the questions that persisted recently is whether to mine public sentiments over current events that affect the education community in Houston and the greater world. Recently I mined the affect of covid-19, and the decision to go online versus staying in schools and teaching methodologies (the article can be found at: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0276511 ), and this proved to be an essential scientific journey as it found that there were several contentions at play. The sentiment also indicated emotional divisions between groups as well.  But is such an exercise important, and what does it mean to do it? With the recent push in politics to have parental voices push back on the curriculum, there has not been a more important time in  vox populi  as it affects what might be included and excluded in the curriculum. Parental voices have reached a tipping point in what goes on in some states. While this blog and its writer stay neutral on what side of the po...

Results of publishing my latest paper  Just recently I published my first scientific (as opposed to anthropological) article in a mega-journal (See article at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2022.e08888 ). I searched for a home for the article in two different journals prior, but it had been rejected after one journal editor noted that the article was technically sound. Another editor stated that the topic modeling would be of no interest to readers. The First editor stated that the article was too narrow a topic generally for their readership to be published in their journal. Considering that there were only less than a handful of journals existing that would handle this article, I was given the suggestion by one of the editors to consider the present home for the article, Heliyon .  The mega-journal Heliyon I found  Heliyon  having taken the editor's advice, knowing very little about the journal other than it being run by Elsevier. I could see that it publis...

Considering Newer Research Methodologies Presently most researchers will consider themselves in one preset methodologies set forth decades ago in the mid 2000s. These are usually divided into qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods.  This is fine and good, and allows researchers to fall back on traditions that have been years in the making. This is how we expand precedent and appeal to previous logic to ground the case that our data collection is sound. However, what about making the case that that it is time for new methodologies more intersectional than mixed? Can we add richness to research methodologies and take on some of the emerging issues in education when we invite transdisciplinary involvement with research data? One methodology that I have considered recently is traversing qualitative research with content analysis, and digital humanities methods. I argued that starting from the archive, staging, and preliminary analysis, borrowing from data science, gives resear...