Investigating further text analysis of TEF2 statements

Exploring the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) 2017 submissions using topic modelling to look for language differences between awards. Work for PGCert assignment 2019-20. (All the code is available on GitHub, it will be available CC-BY licenced for the community to adapt and use.)

Contents

1. Introduction
2. Method
3. Analysis
4. Conclusions
5. References
6. Directory structure

Live interactive visualisations

• See the 🇬🇧whole visualisation
• See breakdown by award: 🥇gold visualisation, 🥈silver visualisation and 🥉bronze visualisation
• See breakdown by level: 🏨HEI visualisation and 🏫FEC visualisation

1. Introduction

The Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) is a major policy initiative in higher education. Moore, Higham, Sanders et al. (2017) explain how the submissions made by providers in the TEF Year Two (TEF2) process provided a detailed source of evidence for excellence in teaching and impact evaluation practice. The Higher Education Academy (HEA) commissioned a research team to devise and undertake a data mining process on the text content of each submission. The results provided an initial guidance of a gold, silver or bronze award, some of which were adjusted by a panel before deciding a final outcome (Kernohan (2017)).

There are further data mining techniques and visualisation tools which can be used to study the submission texts in the following ways:

1. To look at what UK education institutions are saying as a whole.
2. To compare statements of institutions by the award they were given.
3. To compare statements of higher and further education levels.

These findings may be able to assist or guide future work. The R programming language has been used to prepare and analyse the data files.

2. Method

The TEF2 statement texts and award data were downloaded from the Office for Students website. These data files are available in CSV and/or Excel format. The statements are available in PDF format. Work was required to convert and interpret files using R.

LDA (Latent Direchlet Allocation) is a topic modelling technique that has been used to analyse the statements. It has been applied in previous work by Poon, Goloshchapova et al. (2018). The statements (documents) are taken through a series of pre-processing steps including stemming and removing stop-words, then the LDA process ('text2vec') is applied. The pre-processing could be further improved after running the LDA process the first time by customising the list of stop-words or by tokenising instead of stemming.

The LDA process aims to identify topics that are covered in one or more documents by looking at the frequency and co-occurence of words. A hyper-parameter for this model, 'number of latent topics', was set to 50.

Two output matrices are produced:

• A list of 50 keywords for each of the topics selected.
• The probability of relevance of each topic in each document.

The six most likely keywords are shown in the analyses below. These lists are useful for identifying garbage terms, some of which could be removed if re-running the process. The identified topics may include terms which a human can identify as being related to the same real topic.

The 'LDAvis' software is used to visualise the topics, list which terms have been identified, and map how the topics relate to each other. (Topics with more terms in common appear in close proximity on the intertopic distance maps). Interpreting the LDAvis output can help to further refine the LDA process.

After running the LDA process on the whole set of documents, it was repeated with subsets for each of the gold, silver and bronze awarded institutions, with a visualisation for each. It was also repeated with subsets for higher and further education institutions.

3. Analysis

Most salient terms

These terms are most important within the identified topics. Note that all terms have been stemmed (the ends of words are removed so that 'support', 'supporting' and 'supported' are treated the same, for example).

Rank	🇬🇧Whole	🥇Gold	🥈Silver	🥉Bronze	🏨HEI	🏫 FEC
1	student	student	student	student	univers	colleg
2	univers	univers	univers	colleg	student	student
3	colleg	teach	colleg	univers	teach	learn
4	learn	colleg	learn	teach	learn	educ
5	support	learn	teach	progamm	employ	support
6	teach	support	support	support	support	higher

Most frequent terms

These terms are most frequent, regardless of topics.

Rank	🇬🇧Whole	🥇Gold	🥈Silver	🥉Bronze	🏨HEI	🏫FEC
1	student	student	student	student	student	student
2	univers	univers	learn	learn	univers	colleg
3	learn	support	univers	colleg	learn	support
4	support	teach	develop	support	support	learn
5	teach	learn	teach	develop	teach	develop
6	colleg	provid	employ	univers	develop	staff

• All institutions talk about students more than anything else.
• HEI institutions talk about universities, while LEC institutions talk about colleges, as one might expect (although this could be when they mention their own name)
• HEI institutions talk more about employment/employability and teaching than FEC.
• All institutions talk about teaching and/or learning a lot.
• Gold and bronze institutions talk a lot about support.
• In a brief comparison with the study of corporate social responsibility in Poon et al. (2018), the topics identified in TEF2 overlap more; the same terms appear more often in multiple topics. This could mean that TEF2 submissions use a lot of the same language as each other. Further refinement of the LDA process is required to make that claim with confidence.

Major topics

These are the six most salient terms from each of the five widest distributed topics for each study (the largest circles in the visualisation).

• The tables are excerpts from the *_word_vectors_for_each_topic.csv files.
• The charts are intertopic distance maps where each circle is a topic and topic 1 is coloured red. Topics with similar terms appear close on the chart.
• See the visualisations for each study for interactive maps and tables with percentages.

🇬🇧Whole

See the 🇬🇧whole visualisation

Topic 1	Topic 2	Topic 3	Topic 4	Topic 5
support	teach	work	learn	univers
student	learn	research	employ	student
learn	student	graduat	support	teach
develop	success	learn	teach	undergradu
includ	experi	employ	skill	studi
feedback	demonstr	practic	profession	academ

• Much overlap between topics.
• Would need to look further at all 50 topics to find ones that are clearer.

🥇Gold

See the 🥇gold visualisation

Topic 1	Topic 2	Topic 3	Topic 4	Topic 5
student	univers	student	practic	well
support	teach	academ	staff	first
improv	student	support	learn	year
research	learn	also	feedback	provid
inform	studi	use	includ	three
data	subject	person	programm	take

🥈Silver

See the 🥈silver visualisation

Topic 1	Topic 2	Topic 3	Topic 4	Topic 5
develop	learn	student	student	colleg
learn	develop	provid	metric	student
teach	programm	programm	tef	part
profession	student	feedback	employ	progress
staff	support	learn	data	work
practic	staff	access	assess	area

🥉Bronze

See the 🥉bronze visualisation

Topic 1	Topic 2	Topic 3	Topic 4	Topic 5
employ	student	student	colleg	learn
work	learn	staff	higher	ukprn
skill	develop	develop	provis	can
feedback	project	support	develop	name
use	support	higher	learn	event
student	research	innov	degree	offer

• No particular differences between gold, silver and bronze awarded institutions.

🏨HEI

See the 🏨HEI visualisation

Topic 1	Topic 2	Topic 3	Topic 4	Topic 5
student	learn	univers	develop	support
feedback	develop	student	learn	employ
academ	work	employ	research	teach
offer	experi	studi	staff	sector
work	profession	enhanc	institut	improv
librari	staff	engag	provid	work

🏫FEC

See the 🏫FEC visualisation

Topic 1	Topic 2	Topic 3	Topic 4	Topic 5
student	student	colleg	employ	student
support	develop	educ	higher	within
skill	learn	learn	progress	engag
use	support	work	programm	academ
cours	skill	provis	student	develop
develop	work	curriculum	ensur	support

4. Conclusions

• LDA analysis can help to further understand the results as a whole.
• We can be reassured that the process confirms the most obvious expectations (the main focus is students, teaching and learning).
• We can begin to identify topics but there is much overlap.
• So far, there are no outstanding differences between gold, silver and bronze awarded institutions.
• More work is required to refine the process; it might work better if the data set was larger or if the pre-processing was customised further. The code could be further optimised.
• We could extend to look at multiple years of submissions.

5. References

Moore, J, Higham, L, Sanders, J, Jones, S, Candarli, D, Mountford-Zimdars, A 2017, 'Evidencing teaching excellence: Analysis of the TEF2 provider submissions', Higher Education Academy.

Office for Students 2019, TEF data, Office for Students.

Poon, S-H, Goloshchapova, I, Pritchard, M & Reed, P 2018, 'Corporate Social Responsibility Reports: Topic Analysis and Big Data Approach', European Journal of Finance.

Kernohan, D 2017, 'TEF results - Who moved up and who fell down?', Wonkhe.

6. Directory structure

data/

• raw/ (excluded from version control)
  • tef_y2_allcontext.csv contextual data
  • tef_y2_allmetrics.csv all the metrics
  • tefyeartwo_awards.xlsx all the outcomes/awards
  • TEFYearTwo_AllSubmissions/ folder
    • 232 files with names such as:
    • 10000055_Abingdon and Witney College_Submission.pdf
    • PROVIDER_TEFUKPRN underscore PROVIDER_NAME underscore .pdf
  • TEFYearTwo_AllSubmissions_txt/ folder
    • We convert all the PDF documents to TXT files.
• processed/
  • tdm.rds text document matrix data for the whole (may use later)
  • gold_tdm.rds text document matrix data for the gold awards
  • silver_tdm.rds text document matrix data for the silver
  • bronze_tdm.rds text document matrix data for the bronze
  • hei_tdm.rds text document matrix data for higher education
  • fec_tdm.rds text document matrix data for further education

code/

• convert_pdf2txt.R Convert directory in one go from PDF to txt
• text2vec_whole.R Perform LDA (column for award) and create visualization
• text2vec_gold.R Just gold awarded institutions (run after 'whole')
• text2vec_silver.R Just silver awarded institutions (run after 'whole')
• text2vec_bronze.R Just bronze awarded institutions (run after 'whole')
• text2vec_hei.R Just 'HigherEducationInstitution' (run after 'whole')
• text2vec_fec.R Just 'FurtherEducationCollege' (run after 'whole')

result/

• LDA_plot.Rmd The knitR file to launch the visualization
• LDA_plot.html The knitted visualization
• whole_doc_topic_probabilities.csv Probability of each topic in each doc
• whole_word_vectors_for_each_topic.csv Which words occur in which topics
• ldavis/ folder
  • The HTML, CSS and JavaScript files for the LDA_plot.html file
• LDA_plot_gold.Rmd
• LDA_plot_gold.html
• gold_doc_topic_probabilities.csv
• gold_word_vectors_for_each_topic.csv
• gold_ldavis/ folder
• LDA_plot_silver.Rmd
• LDA_plot_silver.html
• silver_doc_topic_probabilities.csv
• silver_word_vectors_for_each_topic.csv
• silver_ldavis/ folder
• LDA_plot_bronze.Rmd
• LDA_plot_bronze.html
• bronze_doc_topic_probabilities.csv
• bronze_word_vectors_for_each_topic.csv
• bronze_ldavis/ folder
• LDA_plot_hei.Rmd
• LDA_plot_hei.html
• hei_doc_topic_probabilities.csv
• hei_word_vectors_for_each_topic.csv
• hei_ldavis/ folder
• LDA_plot_fec.Rmd
• LDA_plot_rec.html
• fec_doc_topic_probabilities.csv
• fec_word_vectors_for_each_topic.csv
• fec_ldavis/ folder
• maps/ folder
  • map1_whole.png Intertopic distance map for whole
  • map2_gold.png Intertopic distance map for gold
  • map3_silver.png Intertopic distance map for silver
  • map4_bronze.png Intertopic distance map for bronze
  • map5_hei.png Intertopic distance map for HEI
  • map6_fec.png Intertopic distance map for FEC