Summative Student Course Review Tool Based on Machine Learning Sentiment Analysis to Enhance Life Science Feedback Efficacy

TL;DR

This paper introduces a machine learning-based sentiment analysis tool that summarizes and organizes student feedback from course reviews, providing detailed insights into pedagogical effectiveness and student opinions.

Contribution

It presents a novel method for analyzing unstructured student comments to generate structured, topic-specific feedback reports using sentiment analysis techniques.

Findings

Effective summarization of student opinions achieved

Generation of detailed, topic-specific feedback reports

Utilization of NLP tools like Google's Natural Language API

Abstract

Machine learning enables the development of new, supplemental, and empowering tools that can either expand existing technologies or invent new ones. In education, space exists for a tool that supports generic student course review formats to organize and recapitulate students' views on the pedagogical practices to which they are exposed. Often, student opinions are gathered with a general comment section that solicits their feelings towards their courses without polling specifics about course contents. Herein, we show a novel approach to summarizing and organizing students' opinions via analyzing their sentiment towards a course as a function of the language/vocabulary used to convey their opinions about a class and its contents. This analysis is derived from their responses to a general comment section encountered at the end of post-course review surveys. This analysis, accomplished with Python, LaTeX, and Google's Natural Language API, allows for the conversion of unstructured text data into both general and topic-specific sub-reports that convey students' views in a unique, novel way.