Trending Research Topics in the Field of Physics Education from 2017 to 2019 in Highly Reputable International Journals

Abstract

This study aims to map the physics education research topics trending in the last three years in highly reputable international journals. This is a descriptive study that analyzed 511 articles using content analysis. All articles were selected from the top 3 academic journals: International Journal of Science Education (IJSE), Research in Science Education (RISE), and Science Education (SE). All three journals have JSRs above 0.8 with a quartile of Q1. Data collection and analysis were carried out from April to September 2020. The results showed that the top research topics in the IJSE journal were science learning: contexts, characteristics, and interactions with a percentage of 15.05%. Likewise, in the RISE journal, the topics of science learning: contexts, characteristics, and interactions also ranked first with a percentage of 16.30%. Meanwhile, the top research topics in the SE journal were STEM/STEAM, with a percentage of 13.28%. Based on the results, it can be concluded that overall, the top three research topics highlighted by physics researchers in highly reputable international journals from 2017 to 2019 period were science learning: contexts, characteristics and interactions, STEM/STEAM, and curriculum and assessment.

Thematic Analysis of Indonesian Physics Education Research Literature Using Machine Learning

“…We also utilize almost the whole section of the body of the research paper. Thus, our current study can suggest that LDA considers the more comprehensive nature of thematic analysis rather than using the keywords from research titles as reported by Faisal [14] or selecting small parts of documents [13,[15][16][17]. Second, the distributional hypothesis of topics and the mixed membership of topics have been satisfied through the LDA algorithm.…”

“…These advantages have explained the existence of multidisciplinary aspects of physics education research. Categorization of a single topic in each document as reported by Faisal, et al [14] and Bancong, et al [13] fails to represent that each topic should be interchangeably in each document. Nevertheless, in nature, our paper is dedicated to the aim of exploration and attempts to deliver a promising tool to conduct a more efficient methodology of thematic analysis which successfully helps us to add dimensions of analysis and visualization.…”

“…Therefore, we supplement it by qualitatively crosschecking the content of the most representative papers on each topic in Table 2. This manner of literature reading is different from a traditional content analysis that was approached by the previous Indonesian author in [13][14][15][16][17]. Instead, we were aided by the topical results from Table 1, thus we merely explored the characteristics of each topic based on our clustered understanding in Table 1.…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, Indonesian PER researchers have not yet performed work to analyze their research literature using the similar method performed by our study. Instead, a recent study by Hartono, et al [13] (Indonesian author) investigated a data corpus outside the context of Indonesia. Although Indonesian PER research is still scant with regard to performing a thematic analysis, we must admit that other aims related to Indonesian PER have made several efforts in this area, particularly through the conventional method of content analysis on science education [14], scientific literacy [15], teacher education [16], and learning media [17].…”

The Implementation of Problem Based Learning Model: An Effort in Upgrading Students' Problem-Solving Skills

“…In the revised 2013 curriculum, the term scientific approach is also known. In learning with a scientific method, students become more active (Bancong et al, 2021).…”