Discovery-Enriched curriculum: A text mining approach for assessing students' discoveries

One important pedagogical approach is to motivate students actively learn and discover new knowledge by using contemporary instructional design methods. This is in sharp contrast to another approach that forces students to take a passive rote-learning strategy. To promote active learning, CityU Hong Kong adopted the so-called discovery-enriched curriculum (DEC) pedagogical approach to enhance student learning at the tertiary education setting. While various curriculum design and instructional methods have been explored in recent years, an effective way to assess students' novel discoveries and creativity remains a great challenge. This paper investigates into a relatively new text analytics computational approach to facilitate instructors of identifying and assessing the concrete evidences of students' achievements under a DEC-based pedagogical approach. In particular, we illustrate a topic modeling-based text mining method which can extract the hidden intents and creative ideas of students embedded in their project work. According to our best knowledge, this is one of the few successful research work of applying a topic modeling method to enhance the assessment of students' achievements under a DEC pedagogical approach. The practical application and implications of our work is that educational practitioners can apply the proposed computational method to facilitate the assessment of students' novel discoveries.