Designing a Teacher Recommender System: A Thematic Literature Review of Teacher Evaluation Systems
Marie Grace V. Ortiz | Menchita F. Dumlao
Discipline: Education
Abstract:
Teacher evaluation systems are limited in their ability to provide numerical ratings, often failing
to analyze qualitative feedback to provide teachers with valuable insights to enhance performance. This
paper conducts a thematic literature review of teacher evaluation systems and tools in articles in Google
Scholar, IEEE, and Proquest databases between 2014 and 2024 to determine the most appropriate sentiment
analysis (SA) and topic modeling (TM) algorithms for analyzing student feedback. The review of 48 articles
found that a lexicon-based SA approach, specifically VADER with a customized Filipino lexicon, offers a
robust and practical solution for sentiment detection in a multilingual context. For TM, Latent Dirichlet
Allocation (LDA) with human intervention is the recommended approach, providing a balance between
thematic granularity and computational feasibility. The efficacy and efficiency of both algorithms are found
to improve by increasing the size of a domain-specific corpus of words. Based on these findings, the paper
proposes the design of TeachAIRs. This teacher recommender system includes word cloud visualizations,
sentiment scores per topic, and, most critically, actionable insights derived from the integrated analysis. The
development of this system is highly recommended to provide teachers with valuable and constructive realtime
feedback, ultimately enhancing teaching practices and improving student learning outcomes.
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