Research Trend Analysis of East African Primary Education Using Frequency Domains and Network Text Analysis

This study investigates research trends in East African primary education by analyzing 172 research papers published be-tween 2000 and 2024. The papers were sourced from Google Scholar and Sci-Hub using the keyword “primary education.” The study's objectives were met through trend analysis, frequency-term analysis using distribution tables and chats, and network text analysis techniques. Five corpuses and document matrices were established for countries in the region, con-taining the total number of abstracts for each country. The terms “primary” and “education” were primarily defined to set a lower bounding limit of 0.4, which was used to distinguish between weak and strong nodes (ties) in the network. Addi-tionally, the top 10 frequently occurring terms that were multicollinear with the terms of interest were selected to create a network for each country. The network analysis revealed that research trends in primary education across the region are strongly connected to key themes such as “teachers,” “curriculum,” “enrollment,” “policy,” “household,” and “government.” Furthermore, the study shows that the terms