Online Reviews Are Leading Indicators of Changes in K-12 School Attributes. Technical Report

Autor/inn/en	Li, Linsen; Culotta, Aron; Harris, Douglas; Mattei, Nicholas
Institution	National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice (REACH)
Titel	Online Reviews Are Leading Indicators of Changes in K-12 School Attributes. Technical Report
Quelle	(2023), (13 Seiten) PDF als Volltext kostenfreie Datei Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Monographie
Schlagwörter	Elementary Secondary Education; Educational Change; Educational Quality; Language Usage; Prediction; Institutional Characteristics; Socioeconomic Status; Scores; School Effectiveness; Diversity (Institutional); Leadership; School Safety; Web Sites; Reputation; Internet + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Bildungsreform; Quality of education; Bildungsqualität; Sprachgebrauch; Vorhersage; Socio-economic status; Sozioökonomischer Status; Schuleffizienz; Führung; Führungsposition; Web-Design
Abstract	School rating websites are increasingly used by parents to assess the quality and fit of U.S. K-12 schools for their children. These online reviews often contain detailed descriptions of a school's strengths and weaknesses, which both reflect and inform perceptions of a school. Existing work on these text reviews has focused on finding words or themes that underlie these perceptions, but has stopped short of using the textual reviews as leading indicators of school performance. In this paper, we investigate to what extent the language used in online reviews of a school is predictive of changes in the attributes of that school, such as its socio-economic makeup and student test scores. Using over 300K reviews of 70K U.S. schools from a popular ratings website, we apply language processing models to predict whether schools will significantly increase or decrease in an attribute of interest over a future time horizon. We find that using the text improves predictive performance significantly over a baseline model that does not include text but only the historical time-series of the indicators themselves, suggesting that the review text carries predictive power. A qualitative analysis of the most predictive terms and phrases used in the text reviews indicates a number of topics that serve as leading indicators, such as diversity, changes in school leadership, a focus on testing, and school safety. (As Provided).
Anmerkungen	National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice. 1555 Poydras Street Suite 700, New Orleans, LA 70112. Tel: 870-540-6576; e-mail: info@reachcentered.org; Web site: https://reachcentered.org/
Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2024/1/01