Chances of Twitter for PK-based assessment and teaching in higher education

Resumen

The new generations of university students are increasingly using ICT for learning. In addition to their trends in the learning process, it is well known that their prior knowledge (PK) impacts significantly on learning acquisition. Considering the strategic advantages of technology, we aimed to display benefits of Twitter for PK-based assessment and teaching in higher education. In this paper, a trial with 61 students is shown. PK about the terms ‘Research’ and ‘Scientific Research’ was assessed using Twitter and Text Mining. Data gathering was conducted by means of a specific software, implemented with Python and Java. The definitions students’ provided in Twitter were extracted through the Application Programming Interface (API) of this social network. Both definitions were analyzed in the R software using text pre-processing techniques, and hierarchical and co-occurrence grouping analyses for getting the distributions and emerging relations between several lexical units. Results suggest that students associated research mostly to information searching and not much to the application of a rigorous and systematic method. That was interesting for teaching, as gave opportunities for clarifying general wrong PK at a time and building complex mental structures based on correct PK. The efficiency of Twitter in different PK assessments and the limitations of its use in future lines of work are discussed.