The Words We Tweet: How Social Media Is Changing the Politics of Education

• In Event: The Redefinition of Teacher Professionalism, Knowledge, and Practice in the 21st Century

Abstract

The Common Core State Standards have been a persistent flashpoint in the debate over the direction of American education that has been even further catalyzed by various social media channels. In this paper we explore the Common Core debate as it takes place on Twitter drawing on data over 24 months that reflects close to 200,000 actors and almost 1 million tweets. Using a distinctive combination of social network analyses and psychological investigations we reveal both the underlying social structure of the conversation and the motivations of the participants.

The first part of this paper will establish the landscape of activity based on the analysis of the social networks of the set of actors within the Common Core debate. We examine these networks based on the tweet activity of the actors themselves and determine three core factions within the larger network. We then transition into the core of the paper, which is about the lexical tendencies of the actors within this debate and what those propensities may indicate about thinking styles related to the Common Core discussion.

Stretching back well into the 1950s a long lineage of psychological studies show that the words we use provide tremendous insight into the workings of our mind. In this work we systematically examined over 500,000 tweets from more than 100,000 highly influential actors to discover the lexical tendencies of members of the three major factions of the Common Core debate we identify from our social network analysis. Using an innovative large scale text mining strategy, we analyze the linguistic choices in the tweets of members of the three core factions from the study. Our analysis assesses four distinct psychological dimensions: mood, thinking style, level of conviction, and drive orientation. We find that the different groups had distinctly different psychological profiles that provides insights into their emotions, motivations, and strategies as specifically related to the Common Core debate on Twitter.

Based on the habitual use of certain word groups, we found that each faction had a distinct style of thought and when recalling the definitions of the three measured types, certain insights come to light: Analytic thinkers understand the world through division and distinction, finding ways to group and order people, places, and events into separate categories of their own design or selection. Narrative thinkers on the other hand interpret information through stories and focus their thoughts on the individual experience. They understand the world and express themselves through anecdote, seeing life occur at the personal level. Finally, Formal thinkers tend to use more distant language and communicate in structured, dry clips, using high level language and rigid argumentation. These differences in the use of thinking by each faction indicated where breakdowns in communication occurred and how various groups positioned their views on the Common Core.

Authors

• Alan J. Daly, University of California - San Diego

• Jonathan A. Supovitz, University of Pennsylvania

• Christian A Kolouch, University of Pennsylvania