REVIEW OF TRENDS IN PHYSICS EDUCATION RESEARCH USING TOPIC MODELING

Abstract

For both physicists who teach students in university and physics educators, how physics should be taught is a vital question. This study reviewed the trends of research in the field of physics education to identify the status of physics education research and help researchers in future studies. 2,959 articles were collected from the American Journal of Physics (AJP) and 745 articles from the Physics Review Physics Education Research (PRPER). Abstracts of the collected articles were used for the study. After preprocessing the texts of the abstracts, topics were extracted from the texts using topic modeling. The Late Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model of Mallet was used for topic modeling. A total of 13 topics were extracted from the two journals. In recent years, “pedagogical content of knowledge (PCK),” “assessment” of achievement and “gender” of student have been topics of increasing interest; “teacher education” and “students’ reasoning process” have been topics with continuous high interest, and “introductory physics” and “problem solving” in physics have been topics with decreasing interest. Keywords: physics education research, physics education, research trend, topic modeling.