Twenty Years of Left-Behind Children Education in Rural China: Based on Structural Topic Model

Abstract

[Purpose/Significance] The introduction of national poverty alleviation policies and rural revitalization strategies has thrust the issue of education for left-behind children into the spotlight of scholarly attention. Education, far beyond serving as a mere instrument for personal growth and human capital accumulation for left-behind children, emerges as a pivotal measure in consolidating rural poverty alleviation endeavors and breaking the transmission of intergenerational poverty in China. It stands as a vital force propelling the future of rural revitalization. Yet, the existing literature on the education of left-behind children remains sporadic and dispersed. A more profound organizational effort, integrating, synthesizing, and evaluating this scattered literature, is imperative to establish a foundational framework for future research, fostering more cohesive and focused research endeavors. Presently, literature review studies primarily fall into three categories: qualitative review methods, meta-analysis, and bibliometric analysis methods employing tools like Citespace. This study sets out to achieve a systematic and comprehensive understanding of education-related issues for rural left-behind children through text mining methods grounded in topic models. [Method/Process] The advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies has empowered the processing and analysis of vast amounts of textual data. Previous research, employing latent dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic models, successfully mined texts related to teacher team construction reform policies, internationalization in higher education literature, news reports, and online comments. In this study, a corpus was meticulously constructed using abstract texts extracted from 2037 journal articles published between 2002 and 2023. The structural topic model (STM) was chosen for topic modeling, overcoming the limitations associated with LDA, with a specific emphasis on exploring the diversity and dynamism of topics within the existing literature. [Results/Conclusions] The culmination of this research effort identified eight distinct research themes: psychological well-being, factors leading to left-behind children, macro-level coping strategies, types of guardianship, review studies, family education, media literacy, and micro-level coping strategies. By synergizing document metadata information, the study systematically unraveled the evolving trends of these topics over time, providing crucial insights into potential shifts in the focus of left-behind children's education research. It is essential to note that this study, while collecting abstracts instead of full texts, may not capture the entirety of information contained in complete research articles. Future research endeavors should explore left-behind children's education more comprehensively, leveraging full-text mining techniques for a more nuanced understanding of this critical subject.

Keywords

• left-behind children|topic model|structural topic model|information literacy