Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 27th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview WG7: Public Administration Education Author(s) Damijana Keržič University of Ljubljana Ljubljana Slovenia Danko Manica, Manica Danko Title Text Mining Method in the Analysis of Peer Observation Notes of Teaching in Public Administration Study Programmes File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract Quality teaching and learning environment at the Faculty of Public Administration, the University of Ljubljana, empowers administration graduates to obtain knowledge, skills and competences needed and boosts teachers to introduce cross-curricular collaboration and innovative flexibility in their teaching. Peer observation of teaching is, according to the literature, one of the approaches in establishing pedagogical excellence and an efficient method in the professional development of higher education teachers in public administration study programmes. In peer observation, peer teachers/observers attend each other's lectures and by making written notes, they record their observations (e.g. about strengths, weaknesses or opportunities for improvements and suggestion for teaching, their attitudes). The observation form contains comparable aspects of observation in open-ended questions, namely: (1) introduction into lectures or tutorials, (2) central part of lectures or tutorials with an emphasis on communication with students/active participation of students, teaching material, pace/dynamics, inspired teaching, what should be changed), (3) concluding activities in lectures or tutorials and (4) concluding/summarising observations of teachers in observation forms. The aim of the investigation of peer observation sheets is to detect teachers’ wording of their reflection on the observed teaching and collect the information about their common attitudes to peer observation and teaching in general. In order to establish objective research and automatically inspect the written peer observation notes and search for interconnections within, we used the computer algorithms which enable text analysis. The main problem of text analysis is a human language which computer does not understand as such. Therefore, some obvious steps must be made to prepare a written text in a form, suitable for computer analysis. The word clouds were used to visualize and compare the wording used in observed lectures and tutorials in the three sections: pre-, in- and post- observation. The differences in the choice of language used in observations of the two study programmes were also analysed. The findings can guide the observed and the observing teachers towards improvements in their teaching and reinforcement of interdisciplinary teaching in public administration study.
