Amplifying Student Voice through AI
Stuart Grey · 2024
This study investigated distinct themes of student “voice” in UK higher education student comments using artificial intelligence (AI). These themes encompassed: “Voice as strategy”, emphasising the tactical employment of voice; “Voice as participation”, highlighting students as active contributors to educational discourse; “Voice as difference”, which acknowledged the diverse student experience; and “Voice as right”, underscoring the importance of students’ inherent rights in academic conversations. Machine learning models, trained on expert-annotated data, were used to classify large volumes of student feedback (more than 500,000 comments) into these themes. Frequency and sentiment analysis, made possible using machine learning, discerned the relative prominence of each theme and comparative demographic analysis highlighted variations the among different student groups. This innovative AI-driven approach not only offered a nuanced understanding of student voice but also showcased the transformative potential of AI in academic research within UK higher education.