Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Science Education Research
Sociopolitical Change
External Conditions
Topic Modeling
Policy and Practice
How Does Science Education Research Respond to Sociopolitical Change? A BERTopic Analysis of Korean Research
🤖 AI Summary
该研究使用BERTopic分析了2008至2025年间韩国科学教育研究对社会政治变化的响应，识别出与政府政策、课程改革等外部因素关联度高的主题。
📝 Abstract
Research fields do not evolve in isolation: their questions and priorities shift with policy, curriculum reform, and broader social change. Analyzing published literature can reveal not only how a field matures but also how it responds to these conditions. Prior work in science education has focused on identifying research topics and their trends, but paid less attention to the external conditions in which research is produced. We examine Korean science education research from 2008 to 2025, a case in which centralized curriculum revision, government education initiatives, and demographic decline are prominent. Using BERTopic, an embedding-based topic modeling technique, we identify major topics and temporal trends, and analyze their associations with selected sociopolitical factors. We interpret each topic and distinguish three groups: sociopolitical, subject-specific, and student-related topics. Within the first group, science teacher professionalism and curriculum implementation, science education for gifted students, and STEAM education show the strongest associations with sociopolitical conditions, such as government policy initiatives and declining enrollment in science-gifted education, whereas digital-based science education does not. The subject-specific and student-related groups, by contrast, show no comparable movement and are not linked to the external indicators we examine; this pattern is interpreted as reflecting stronger disciplinary grounding. Taken together, these patterns suggest that a topic's anchoring to policy and practice or to academic disciplines shapes how closely it tracks external change. This helps explain why some research agendas move with their national context while others hold steady, and why the same topic may develop differently across countries.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
BERTopic
embedding-based topic modeling
sociopolitical factors
science education research
🔎 Similar Papers
No similar papers found.
