Research Trend Analysis on African Primary Education Innovation Using Network Text Analysis

Research Trend Analysis on African Primary Education Innovation Using Network Text Analysis

Purpose: This excerpt delineates a guideline for analyzing primary education innovation among African countries in the 21st century based on trend analysis of research papers published from 2000 to 2022. A total of 150 papers were selected by searching on Sci-Hub based on the key word “innovation” for primary education in Africa. Method: A corpus of all abstracts containing country, zone, title, and the year of publication was made for the purpose of creating a document-term matrix (DTM) to be used for frequency, trend, and network text analysis. In line with the descriptive statistics, we investigated the relationship among links and nodes based on networks and graph theory. Additionally, we examined and described the nodes' interaction by determining the influential nodes in a network using in-and out-degree centrality. We also chose the center of networks by using topic clusters’ modularity of 0.64, obtained through the Louvain method at a minimum frequency of 10, and analyzed network structures by tokenizing consecutive sequences of words as bi-grams. Results: first, the number of publications related to primary education research innovation in Africa shown incremental growth. Second, the results indicated the most predominant zones that perform studies on research innovations are the “south” and “east” led by South Africa and Kenya. Conclusion: The study observed that most of the research innovation studies for primary education in the prominent zones emerged from “ICT” and “learning methods”. Keywords: ICT, Active-Learning, Network text analysis, Competency-based learning, Research trend analysis