Thematic Analysis of Indonesian Physics Education Research Literature Using Machine Learning

Abstract

Abundant physics education research (PER) literature has been disseminated through academic publications. Over the years, the growing body of literature challenges Indonesian PER scholars to understand how the research community has progressed and possible future work that should be encouraged. Nevertheless, the previous traditional method of thematic analysis possesses limitations when the amount of PER literature exponentially increases. In order to deal with this plethora of publications, one of the machine learning (ML) algorithms from natural language processing (NLP) studies was employed in this paper to automate a thematic analysis of Indonesian PER literature that still needs to be explored within the community. One of the well-known NLP algorithms, latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), was used in this study to extract Indonesian PER topics and their evolution between 2014 and 2021. A total of 852 papers (~4 to 8 pages each) were collectively downloaded from five international conference proceedings organized, peer reviewed, and published by Indonesian PER researchers. Before their topics were modeled through the LDA algorithm, our data corpus was preprocessed through several common procedures of established NLP studies. The findings revealed that LDA had thematically quantified Indonesian PER topics and described their distinct development over a certain period. The identified topics from this study recommended that the Indonesian PER community establish robust development in eight distinct topics to the present. Here, we commenced with an initial interest focusing on research on physics laboratories and followed the research-based instruction in late 2015. For the past few years, the Indonesian PER scholars have mostly studied 21st century skills which have given way to a focus on developing relevant educational technologies and promoting the interdisciplinary aspects of physics education. We suggest an open room for Indonesian PER scholars to address the qualitative aspects of physics teaching and learning that is still scant within the literature.