A Text Mining Examination of University Students’ Learning Program Posters

Abstract

At present, applying text mining techniques to educational data is attracting much research attention. The present study uses text mining techniques to examine posters prepared by university freshmen in engineering fields to present their learning programs and their career goals after graduation, under the expectation that important keywords worth identifying lurked in the posters. The results showed that even though the participating students were only three months into their university education, their learning programs and career goals were already rather concrete and well adapted to the fields and courses they had chosen. Some of them had a remarkably good command of technical engineering terms.