Track papers across labs, topics, and trends.
Search papers, labs, and topics across Lattice.
This study analyzes Korean science education research from 2008 to 2025, employing BERTopic to identify major topics and their temporal trends in relation to sociopolitical factors. The findings reveal that topics such as science teacher professionalism and STEAM education are closely linked to government initiatives and demographic changes, while other areas like digital-based education remain unaffected by these external conditions. This differentiation highlights how the anchoring of research topics to policy versus academic disciplines influences their responsiveness to sociopolitical changes, providing insights into the evolution of research agendas across different contexts.
Research agendas in Korean science education are shaped more by sociopolitical factors than by academic disciplines, revealing why some topics evolve while others remain static.
Research fields do not evolve in isolation: their questions and priorities shift with policy, curriculum reform, and broader social change. Analyzing published literature can reveal not only how a field matures but also how it responds to these conditions. Prior work in science education has focused on identifying research topics and their trends, but paid less attention to the external conditions in which research is produced. We examine Korean science education research from 2008 to 2025, a case in which centralized curriculum revision, government education initiatives, and demographic decline are prominent. Using BERTopic, an embedding-based topic modeling technique, we identify major topics and temporal trends, and analyze their associations with selected sociopolitical factors. We interpret each topic and distinguish three groups: sociopolitical, subject-specific, and student-related topics. Within the first group, science teacher professionalism and curriculum implementation, science education for gifted students, and STEAM education show the strongest associations with sociopolitical conditions, such as government policy initiatives and declining enrollment in science-gifted education, whereas digital-based science education does not. The subject-specific and student-related groups, by contrast, show no comparable movement and are not linked to the external indicators we examine; this pattern is interpreted as reflecting stronger disciplinary grounding. Taken together, these patterns suggest that a topic's anchoring to policy and practice or to academic disciplines shapes how closely it tracks external change. This helps explain why some research agendas move with their national context while others hold steady, and why the same topic may develop differently across countries.