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ERIC Number: ED652691
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2023
Pages: 11
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
Online Reviews Are Leading Indicators of Changes in K-12 School Attributes
Grantee Submission, Paper presented at ACM Web Conference (WWW '23) (Austin, TX, Apr 30-May 4, 2023)
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.
Publication Type: Speeches/Meeting Papers; Reports - Research
Education Level: Elementary Education; Junior High Schools; Middle Schools; Secondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: Institute of Education Sciences (ED); National Science Foundation (NSF), Division of Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS)
Authoring Institution: N/A
IES Funded: Yes
Grant or Contract Numbers: R305C180025; RI2007955; III2107505; RI2134857
Author Affiliations: N/A