Exploring Latent Topics and Research Trends in Mathematics Teachers’ Knowledge Using Topic Modeling: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Mathematics teachers’ knowledge is considered one of the most critical factors in instruction and student achievement. As such, various studies have focused on mathematics teachers’ knowledge. Despite the expansion of the field, however, a systematic review was rarely implemented. Therefore, this study aimed to identify major research topics and trends on mathematics teachers’ knowledge by analyzing abstracts of 3485 scholarly articles published from 1987 to 2021. Using a text-mining technique, 11 underlying topics were found in the articles. The topics were classified based on their relationships and the following four groups were identified: “assessment”, “teachers’ knowledge for teaching”, “students’ knowledge and understanding”, and “teachers’ professional learning”. Over time, the analysis of research trends showed that professional development is the most popular topic, followed by pedagogical content knowledge and students’ mathematical understanding. Moreover, the popularity of these topics has not changed considerably over time. This study provides implications based on these results.

Keywords

• mathematics teachers’ knowledge
• systematic review
• research trends
• topic modeling
• Latent Dirichlet Allocation