Artificial Intelligence Discourse In Education Research In China

Every enormous technological innovation will lead to people's “imagination” and “discussion” about educational reform.The recent breakthroughs made in the field of artificial intelligence have aroused the public's enthusiasm for transforming “old” education with “new” technology to.This enthusiasm also extends to the academic field,forming a number of educational research literatures in response to artificial intelligence.These studies focus on issues such as educational innovation in the era of artificial intelligence,applications of artificial intelligence in education,and artificial intelligence education.There are some critical introspections for these studies,but mostly based on single-sample analysis or theoretical-based critique,few of them regress to texts to have an overall evidence-based description and analysis.In view of this,this research describes and expounds the discourses and characteristics of artificial intelligence research in the field of education based on the current context of China,and then reflect on the main problems and possible deepening paths of existed researches.This thesis regards the papers which are the expression of research results as discourse with three basic dimensions: subject,content and mode of speech.Correspondingly,this thesis chooses the research subjects,research topics,research arguments as a framework for analysis.This thesis mainly applies the content analysis to investigate 623 journal articles that directly discussing artificial intelligence and education,which are selected from China Knowledge Network(CNKI)as the analysis objects.According to the research purpose and the above discourse framework,different sampling strategies are adopted to minutely encode and statistically process these papers.This research found that:(1)In terms of research subjects,researchers involved in artificial intelligence and education issues are widely distributed,however there are few focused followers and continuous followers;researchers are mainly distributed in the discipline of information technology and educational technology;there are many cooperators with the same major and in the same unit,but few cooperators with the different major or in different unit.(2)In terms of research topics,the educational themes related to artificial intelligence focus on “teaching” and “learning”,while themes on “individualized learning” and “intelligent education”,and technologies related to artificial intelligence about “big data” and “machine learning” have obvious co-occurrence characteristics.In the view of the category of the topic,there mostly are transformative issues and applied issues,mainly related to researchers in the field of information technology and educational technology,but few basic issues that mainly initiated by educational theory researchers recently.(3)In terms of research arguments,there mainly involve policies,reports,events,examples,data,etc.;the “technical” arguments are the most common and are often used by researchers in the field of information technology for the discussion of applied issues,usually combined with “policies”,“case” arguments used in the discussion of transformative issues;educational theory researchers use “event” and “case” arguments to discuss fundamental issues.Based on the above findings,it can be seen that the research in this field exists following major problems: First,the position that artificial intelligence would change education requires a careful theoretical defense yet;second,the prediction of education reform based on artificial intelligence lacks reliable demonstration methods to support;third,the interactive research of artificial intelligence and education lacks interdisciplinary cooperation.In response to these problems,this thesis proposes that,in order to truly promote the related research of artificial intelligence and education,it is necessary to understand the social characteristics of artificial intelligence era,to reflect on the technical reality of artificial intelligence,to explore the dual connotation of artificial intelligence and education,and to promote interdisciplinary research and cooperation.