Sunday, 1 March 2015

Readings/Textual Analysis of FLM V17 - 2

It is interesting to note the frequencies of the following terms:

  1. math* - 548 times (about 2.5% of the total number of words)
  2. problems/examples -  274 times (about 1.18%)
  3. educators/teachers - 231 times (about 1%)
  4. student* - 198 times (about 0.86%)
  5. research* - 106 times (about 0.46%)
Superficial observation of the word frequencies may suggest that the 12  articles published in this volume were mostly related to regarding, reducing, or treating mathematics education in terms mathematical terms, i.e. mathematizing. It also correlates well with Bingjie's findings on FLM (V29 - 1, 2, 3) where she found that about 32% of the articles were related to teachers' development, beliefs, knowledge, or thinking.


The same tessellation was used in both Vol. 1 #1 and Vol. 17 #2. I wonder if this tessellation mutated into other forms and appeared elsewhere on the front pages of other FLM issues.

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2 comments:

  1. David Harris3 March 2015 at 14:21

    Wow. I hope that you have some sort of software that can count particular word frequencies, and that you didn't count the word "math" 548 times. If these word counts represent all 12 articles combined together, then I would be hesitant to use the data to make any assumptions. It may be that perhaps one article in particular used the word problem frequently because it was about how children solve word problems.

    Did you find these percentages surprising? If so, did you find them high? Low?

    If the word math was found to be 2.5%, I am actually surprised that it wouldn't be higher. In a mathematical journal titled "For the Learning of Math" I would expect to see the word "math" used more than twice every hundred words. I'm curious how that percentage would change if we included "mathematics" or "maths".

    I'm also curious if you checked on your prediction. Were the articles about mathematization?

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  2. Kevin's blog3 March 2015 at 20:51

    There is no surprise that "math" is the most dominant word in the journal which focuses on diverse math educational themes. What surprises me is that out of the 5 key words, "research" occurs the least. Among the three issues analyzed in FLM, Bingjie found that all 52 authors who wrote articles in FLM consisted of 50 professors and 2 graduate students. Since research is a major enterprise in academia and FLM supports it, it is strange that the frequency of the word, research, is 5 times as low as that of "math". When I read some paragraphs of each article in the 1st issue of FLM, I noticed some research-based material. I believe that different journals have different focal points on math education in order to expand readers' interests and learning scope.

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