A Sentiment Analysis of Emergency Online Special Education after COVID Mass Vaccinations Started

Abstract

This study examined people’s sentiments toward emergency online special education after mass vaccinations became available to determine whether people had positive, negative, or neutral sentiments towards emergency online special education. The results revealed that most tweets were positive and focused on special needs and special education during emergency online special education. Specifically, most tweets focused on special education, and they included a positive content with average daily sentiment scores never getting smaller than zero. Similarly, special need and special education turned out to be the most frequent expressions used, and topic modeling indicated that target tweets’ content focused on the needs of students with special exceptionalities. All these findings suggest that emergency online special education can be a viable alternative during times of crisis and availability of vaccinations at a larger scale may help to create a positive atmosphere thereby informing teacher education and special education research and practice.