Networks in Education: A Travelogue Through Five Decades

Abstract

For over five decades, researchers have used network analysis to understand educational contexts, spanning diverse disciplines and thematic areas. The wealth of traditions and insights accumulated through these interdisciplinary efforts is a challenge to synthesize with a traditional systematic review. To overcome this difficulty in reviewing 1791 articles researching the intersection of networks and education, this study combined a scientometric approach with a more qualitative analysis of metadata, such as keywords and authors. Our analysis shows rapidly growing research that employs network analysis in educational contexts. This research output is produced by researchers in a small number of developed countries. The field has grown more recently, through the surge in the popularity of data-driven methods, the adoption of social media, and themes as teacher professional development and the now-declining MOOC research. Our analysis suggests that research combining networks and educational phenomena continues to lack an academic home, as well as remains dominated by descriptive network methods that depict phenomena such as interpersonal friendship or patterns of discourse-based collaboration.

A multimethod synthesis of Covid-19 education research: the tightrope between covidization and meaningfulness

“…The analysis has shown that the process of knowledge production about COVID-19 was less skewed compared to educational research in general [12,93], with a large global participation of 137 different countries in research productivity. Whereas, research was concentrated in large and resourceful countries such as United States [35,57,67,68], China [77], India [49], Germany [33], United Kingdom [51]; we also see several studies that addressed local and nonwestern contexts, e.g., Philippines [61], Rural South Africa [65], Jordan [63], Romania [56], Indonesia [66].…”

Introducing mindset streams to investigate stances towards STEM in high school students and experts

“…This was not possible in this work because the dataset released by [41] came at an aggregate level. With the availability of finer datasets about BFMNs, it would be interesting to explore insights that individual-level mindset streams could bring over learning analytics [33], e.g. are students with more positive mindset streams also better at learning STEM subjects?…”

How and with Whom Do Educators Learn in an Online Professional Development Microcredential

“…Several scholars (Bragg et al, 2021;Lantz-Andersson et al, 2018;Lee, 2018) have used principles of Community of Practice by Lave and Wenger (1991) to explore how educators build, develop, maintain and re-create relations and connections with colleagues. According to a recent review by Saqr et al (2022) of fifty years of research of social networks in education there is an increasing body of research specifically using social network approaches to conceptualise, map, and analyse how these relations between educators develop.…”

“…The second part of the survey instrument used a so-called closednetwork analysis Rienties & Kinchin, 2014;Saqr et al, 2022) to measure the social networks within the OPD consisting of three social network questions (i.e., "I am friends with …", "I have learned from …", "I have worked with …"), whereby lists with names of the 19 participants were provided. We adopted the exact same approach as described in Rienties and Kinchin (2014) in order to be able to benchmark this to a PGCAP with similar participants following it in a f2f format.…”