Abstract:

In the project of peer observation of faculty staff at the Faculty of Administration, the University of Ljubljana, the perceptions of teachers and students about pedagogical process were investigated. During the observation process in lecture rooms peer teachers/observers and students/observers made notes by filling in the observation sheets. The aim of the project was to investigate how both stakeholders experience the pedagogical process and what they detect as strengths, weaknesses or opportunities for improvements in the teaching and learning process. The survey compared the observations in order to find out what both groups of observers recognize as important elements of teaching practice and possible similarities and differences in their observations. Recently text mining has become an important research field dealing with text data sets in order to extract meaningful information from un-structured or semi-structured text. With the same purpose, text mining is used to extract information or find patterns from the observers’ notes. 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, by data cleaning and preprocessing steps. Unsupervised learning methods clustering is used to find hidden structures within a written text to present the obtained results.

Keywords:

Peer observation, higher education, pedagogy, text mining, clustering.