Cross-spherical analysis of educational issues

With this post I am presenting my results of the New Media Research: Digital methods' assignment.

Introduction

Almost all debates about education presented by the media are discussing educational problems (Dekkers & Meijnen, 2003), like school dropouts, youth violence, inequalities between ‘white’ and ‘black’ students and many more. If someone experiences somewhere in the society a problem, then mostly it is attributed to the malfunction of the education system, and solutions must be found in education because education forms the youth (Dekkers & Meijnen, 2003). So schools, or rather education in general are often a focal point of the society: Students demand the guarantee that they will get a job after they finished school; the government thinks that schools must form their students into responsible citizens; the economy is looking for qualified future employees; and also parents have certain claims for schools (Dekkers & Meijnen, 2003). That means that the influence of the society on schools is manifold.

But also the documentation of media of this influence is manifold and could have an influence on the society (Slater, 2007). Online newspapers and magazines write for example about current educational issues, bloggers try to find solution for certain issues in education, search engines provide their users with many definitions of for instance ADHD or dyslexia, and vice versa. Other media like television, radio, books, etc. also report about this particular topic but they are not of interest for this research. Moreover, this research tries to study the importance of several educational issues mentioned online and compares the sources which were returned by three different spheres for the same query. During this research the following spheres will be compared: the blogosphere (using Google Blog search), the newssphere (using Google News search), and the websphere (using Google Web search).

Questions

Which educational issue is the most prominent one according to the blogosphere, the web, and the news?
Are there differences between the spheres according to the hierarchy of educational issues?

Method

Making a list of educational issues:

The list of educational issues comes from two sources. The first source is the book about educational science [Onderwijskunde] written by Verloop and Lowyck (2003). This book describes the following educational issues:

• bullying
• attendance
• “school dropouts”
• “learning disabilities”
• ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder)
• dyslexia
• “teacher shortage”
• “education reform”
• “class size”
• inequality (referring to socioeconomic status, countries, sex, religous background, origin, etc.)

This list was enriched with other educational issues using the Wikipedia category of education issues. Not all issues were added because some of them refers to problems at universities and others were specific for a certain country, for instance ‘Kyoiku mama’, a Japanese name for a very ambitious mother, ‘Ragging in Sri Lanka’ or ‘Textbooks in Israel’, or were not a real educational issue, e.g. ‘James Garbarino’ or ‘Haidbauer incident’. So the added issues are:

• “school uniform”
• drugs
• “sex education” (not part of Wikipedia’s list but mentioned in many news articles and therefore seen as relevant)

Within this list you will find ADHD and dyslexia - two learning disabilities, which is also a search term for educational issues. Though, these two disabilities are added to the list to get a detailed overview of which disability is more often mentioned in the spheres.

Cross-spherical analysis:

Querying the websphere using Google Web search

1. The top hundred results for the search term “educational issues” using Google Web search were collected and pasted into the Harvester tool in order to get the extracted URLs from the search engine results.
2. These top hundred URLs of returns for the query “educational issues” were then copied and pasted into the top text box of Googlescraper (Lippmannian Device) tool. The list of educational issues were placed (one per line) into the bottom text box of the tool: “educational issue” + “issue x”.
3. After using the Googlescraper, a ranking of the educational issues by number of mentions by single URLs in the top hundred is presented for the comparison with other spheres.

Querying the newssphere using Google News search

1. The top hundred results for the search term “educational issues” using Google News search were collected and pasted into the Harvester tool in order to get the extracted URLs from the search engine results.
2. These top hundred URLs of returns for the query “educational issues” were then copied and pasted into the top text box of Googlescraper (Lippmannian Device) tool. The list of educational issues were placed (one per line) into the bottom text box of the tool: “educational issue” + “issue x”.
3. After using the Googlescraper, a ranking of the educational issues by number of mentions by single URLs in the top hundred is presented for the comparison with other spheres.

Querying the blogosphere using Google Blog search

1. The top hundred results for the search term “educational issues” using Google Blog search were collected and pasted into the Harvester tool in order to get the extracted URLs from the search engine results.
2. These top hundred URLs of returns for the query “educational issues” were then copied and pasted into the top text box of Googlescraper (Lippmannian Device) tool. The list of educational issues were placed (one per line) into the bottom text box of the tool: “educational issue” + “issue x”.
3. After using the Googlescraper, a ranking of the educational issues by number of mentions by single URLs in the top hundred is presented for the comparison with other spheres.

 Findings

Google Web results:

The ranking of the thirteen educational issues, starting with the least mentioned and ending with the most often mentioned issue.

"school uniform" (46) 
"school dropout" (62)
"teacher shortage" (81)
"learning disability" (153)
"class size" (360)   
dyslexia (369)  
ADHD (394) 
"sex education" (624)
bullying (680) 
"education reform" (712)  
inequality (898)  
attendance (1097)
drugs (1662)  

These results show that there is a prominent issue in education, viz. drugs. The least favoring issue is school uniform. There is also not a strong favoring of one of the two learning disabilities; dyslexia was 369 times mentioned and ADHD 394 times.

Google News results:

The ranking of the thirteen educational issues, starting with the least mentioned and ending with the most often mentioned issue.

"school uniform" (9)
"teacher shortage" (19)
"learning disability" (22)
"school dropout" (26)
dyslexia (33)
"sex education" (42) 
ADHD (49)
inequality (76)
"class size" (144)
bullying (165)
"education reform" (250)
attendance (253)
drugs (386)

These results show that there is a prominent issue in education, viz. drugs. The least favoring issue is school uniform. There is also not a strong favoring of one of the two learning disabilities; dyslexia was 33 times mentioned and ADHD 49 times.

Google Blog results:

The ranking of the thirteen educational issues, starting with the least mentioned and ending with the most often mentioned issue.

"school dropout" (22)
"school uniform" (38)
"teacher shortage" (65)
"learning disability" (136)
inequality (162)
"class size" (203)
"education reform" (316)
"sex education" (400)
dyslexia (401)
ADHD (552)
attendance (624)
bullying (683)
drugs (772)

These results show that there is a prominent issue in education, viz. drugs. The least favoring issue is school dropout. There is a favoring of one of the two learning disabilities; dyslexia was 401 times mentioned but ADHD 552 times.

Cross-spherical analysis:

All spheres show more or less a conformity of their results. The educational issues ‘drug’ and ‘attendance’ were in all spheres the most important issues. Whereas ‘school dropout’, ‘school uniform’, and ‘teacher shortage’ were one of the least prominent issues.

All spheres also have an obvious range between the least and the most favorite issue in education. But the websphere has the most extreme range between 46 (school uniform) and 1662 (drugs).

All spheres do not extremely favor one of the two learning disabilities, ADHD and dyslexia.  However, ADHD is always more often mentioned than dyslexia.

Discussion

The list of educational issues is neither complete nor defined for a certain country or group of age. That means, to gain a full overview of educational issues, it would be necessary on the one hand to add more issues (which you can find on Wikipedia Category: Education issues, see 1) and on the other hand to remove sub-issues, like ADHD and dyslexia because they are both learning disabilities. Further, it would be necessary to specify the educational issues for one particular country, group of age, and for only teachers or only student-related issues.

Another problems is that some of the educational issues could be also described with other words, e.g. instead of bullying the terms school violence, hazing, harassment, etc. could be used, or instead of ‘teacher shortage’ the term ‘student-teacher ratio’ could be used.

The most prominent issue in education seems to be drugs, following the search results of the spheres. But it is rather unclear whether these drugs are taken or sold at schools or whether this is a problem of students who take this drugs at home which affects their performance at school. It is also not clear what kind of drugs these spheres are talking about. Drugs, broadly speaking, are substances that change normal bodily functions. So this issue could be about medical drugs, e.g. prescribed drugs for ADHD, or it could be about illegal drugs. That means that it is important for further studies to define precisely the educational issues in order to draw better conclusions.

Literature

Dekkers, H. & Meijnen, W. (2003). Onderwijs in de maatschappelijke context [Education in the     social context]. In: N. Verloop & J. Lowyck (Eds.), Onderwijskunde (pp. 15-61). Groningen, the Netherlands: Wolters-Noordhoff.

Slater, M.D. (2007). Reinforcing Spirals: The Mutual Influence of Media Selectivity and Media Effects and Their Impact on Individual Behavior and Social Identity. Communication Theory, 17(3), 281-303. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2885.2007.00296.x

Verloop, N. & Lowyck, J. (2003). Onderwijskunde [Educational Science]. Groningen, the Netherlands: Wolters-Noordhoff.