An analysis on trends of research topics in civic education using dynamic topic model

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to study the trend of civic and citizenship education research from 2000 to 2020 and the influence the regional background of researches has on the research discussion. Relevant data is collected from ERIC and SCOPUS database. This includes abstracts, published year, regional background of researchers, and author h-index. The keywords used are “civic education” or “citizenship education” or “civics”. There are 4917 papers extracted in total. Upon doing further preparation, 4854 articles are prepared for analysis. We apply Structural Topic model (STM) technique to the abstracts with covariates including the published year and the continents the researchers are from. We found that 1) quantitative research in civic education and politically oriented topics are in decline whereas topics concerning skill development and service learning program are on the rise, 2) In terms of regional background global citizenship education, quantitative research, and national consciousness education are amongst the most popular topics across regions. The rising topic like service learning programs however particular is interested by researchers from Eastern Europe, and Western researchers from 2015 onwards. Philosophical discussion is mainly focused on by Latin American and Asian researchers but the difference are non-significant when compared to papers that are published by researchers from different regional background.