Understanding Students’ Online Reviews to Improve College Experience and Graduation Rates of STEM Programs at the Largest Post-Secondary Institution: A Learner-Centered Study

This Research Category Full Paper presents an analysis of online student reviews to improve college experience. Recent studies continue to establish the efficacy of student-centered teaching strategies in increasing student satisfaction. However, with higher education programs in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields rapidly expanding in size, it is becoming increasingly more difficult not only to implement such strategies but even to identify their presence or absence. This dilemma is prevalent at the University of Central Florida, with several of its STEM programs containing more than 10,000 students. By making use of sentiment analysis and traditional statistics, we can minimize the human oversight needed to thoroughly dissect qualitative data and create a viable approach with which to tackle this issue. In this paper, we analyze massive amounts of open-ended student reviews from multiple online university review sites to gain insights on which needs students feel essential and which they feel are not being met. Through this analysis, we identify how to most efficiently realize learner-centered principles within a large institution, concurrently providing suggestions on how the university can supply their students the best possible education while also maximizing the graduation and retention rates of its STEM programs.