TY  - JOUR
A1  - Lücking, Andy
A1  - Brückner, Sebastian
A1  - Abrami, Giuseppe
A1  - Uslu, Tolga
A1  - Mehler, Alexander
T1  - Computational linguistic assessment of textbooks and online texts by means of threshold concepts in economics
T2  - Frontiers in education
N2  - The ongoing digitalization of educational resources and the use of the internet lead to a steady increase of potentially available learning media. However, many of the media which are used for educational purposes have not been designed specifically for teaching and learning. Usually, linguistic criteria of readability and comprehensibility as well as content-related criteria are used independently to assess and compare the quality of educational media. This also holds true for educational media used in economics. This article aims to improve the analysis of textual learning media used in economic education by drawing on threshold concepts. Threshold concepts are key terms in knowledge acquisition within a domain. From a linguistic perspective, however, threshold concepts are instances of specialized vocabularies, exhibiting particular linguistic features. In three kinds of (German) resources, namely in textbooks, in newspapers, and on Wikipedia, we investigate the distributive profiles of 63 threshold concepts identified in economics education (which have been collected from threshold concept research). We looked at the threshold concepts' frequency distribution, their compound distribution, and their network structure within the three kinds of resources. The two main findings of our analysis show that firstly, the three kinds of resources can indeed be distinguished in terms of their threshold concepts' profiles. Secondly, Wikipedia definitely shows stronger associative connections between economic threshold concepts than the other sources. We discuss the findings in relation to adequate media use for teaching and learning—not only in economic education.
KW  - threshold concepts
KW  - corpus study
KW  - wikipedia
KW  - newspaper
KW  - specialized vocabulary
KW  - network model
KW  - economics
KW  - textbooks
Y1  - 2021
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/57532
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-575322
UR  - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feduc.2020.578475/abstract
SN  - 1664-8021
VL  - 5
IS  - Article 578475
PB  - Frontiers Media
CY  - Lausanne
ER  -