3. Switching Methods

My boss initially suggested wanting to play with text analysis to assess these responses, and I had always planned to dabble in this a little. With topic modeling not giving me the answers I wanted, though, I decided to make text analysis the prominent method of assessment. Text analysis was a great second option because it allows for analyzing trends, word frequencies, and patterns in a corpus, among other things.

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I decided to experiment with three different text analysis tools. I first used DataBasic’s SameDiff tool to compare the faculty suggestions for tutorials with the student survey responses. I also used another DataBasic tool, WordCounter, to generate basic counts of words in the student responses. Finally, I used Voyant to dig into the responses a little more and find some patterns in the corpus of responses.