Common Core State Standards on Twitter: Public Sentiment and Opinion Leaders
Accepted manuscript version of an article published by Sage in:
Wang, Yinying, and David J. Fikis. “Common Core State Standards on Twitter: Public Sentiment and Opinion Leaders.” Educational Policy, (August 2017). https://doi.org/10.1177/0895904817723739.
Abstract
The purpose of this study is to examine the public opinion on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) on Twitter. Using Twitter API, we collected the tweets containing the hashtags #CommonCore and #CCSS for 12 months from 2014 to 2015. A Common Core corpus was created by compiling all the collected 660,051 tweets. The results of sentiment analysis suggest Twitter users expressed overwhelmingly negative sentiment towards the CCSS in all 50 states. Five topic clusters were detected by cluster analysis of the hashtag co-occurrence network. We also found that most of the opinion leaders were those who expressed negative sentiment towards the CCSS on Twitter. This study for the first time demonstrates how text mining techniques can be applied to education policy research, laying the foundation for real-time analytics of public opinion on education policies, thereby informing policymaking and implementation.