Analysis of College Students’ Career Awareness after Taking First-Year Career Courses Using the Structural Topic Model
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.52731/lir.v003.098Keywords:
actual state of learning, career education, first-year experience, learning evaluation, structural topic modelAbstract
This study analyzed career awareness as a result of first-year career education courses using the Structural Topic Model (STM). Career awareness refers to topics mentioned in students' free-writing reports on career understanding. We examined career awareness from two perspectives. First, we examined the career awareness of students who were learning the target subjects without any influence from year-to-year fluctuations. Second, we focused on topics consistently generated as students’ career awareness and examined the differences in career awareness of each student type classified according to their interest in the lecture content, focusing on the difference in the word distribution of the topics. To examine these two perspectives, we extracted topics through STM analysis to set year and student type as covariates of topic prevalence, and student type as a covariate of topic content. The results showed that there were three topics of career awareness that remained stable regardless of year: “self-strengths and weaknesses,” “encounters with others with different values,” and “toward life fulfillment.” We found that for “toward a fulfilling life,” one type of students tended to use words with a long time span meaning, while another type of students tended to use words with a short time span meaning.
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