Trends and Issues in Technology Education Research in Taiwan: A Co-Word Analysis of 1994-2013 Graduate Theses

Abstract

In Taiwan, the “Technology Education (TE)” for graders 1-12 is comprised of courses “Living Technology (LT)” and “Information Technology (IT).” With its ever-changing feature, TE needs on-going research to support its decisions and actions. The education-related academic programs in universities regularly concern about the development of primary and secondary education. To identify the evolution directions and knowledge orientation of the research topics of dissertations and theses from the LT and IT education graduate programs will be helpful for clarifying trends and issues in TE in primary and secondary education. Hence, this study used co-word analysis of bibliometrics to analyze the evolution directions and knowledge orientation of the research topics of the dissertations and theses from all LT and IT education graduate programs in Taiwan and completed in the last decade (2004~2013 academic years). Totally, 884 LT and 992 IT summaries of dissertations and theses in National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations in Taiwan served as the subject of this study. The results show: (1) The number of LT’s and IT’s dissertations and theses significantly declined; (2) LT’s research topical focuses have moved to e-learning, while IT’s focuses have changed from universal e-learning to game-based e-learning; (3) The co-word network maps of LT and IT indicate the lack of closeness between clusters and inter-nodes, which means that it is not well-structured between research sub-arears and theme; and (4) The research topics completed are in lack of teacher’s professional development and technological/information literacy.



Author Information
Lung-Sheng Lee, National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan
Yu-Shen Fang, National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan

Paper Information
Conference: ECE2015
Stream: Higher education

This paper is part of the ECE2015 Conference Proceedings (View)
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Posted by James Alexander Gordon