Analysis of the issues that emerged in the revision of the national social studies curriculum in South Korea: Text mining and semantic network analysis of the comments at the public hearing on YouTube

Abstract

In South Korea, curriculum is revised, made public and implemented under a system known as a nation led curriculum. The South Korean national curriculum was completely revised 10 times between 1946 and 2015. At present, a complete revision is underway to replace the current 2015 national curriculum which is called the 2022 revised national curriculum. This study aims to analyze stakeholders’ responses to the YouTube public hearing   on social studies curriculum according to the 2022 revised national curriculum in South Korea in order to understand the context and causes of the issues that emerged. Text mining, semantic network analysis and word cloud techniques were employed to identify issues. As a result, three issues were identified in the social studies curriculum: the balanced development of general elective subjects in high school; the separation of social sciences and geography and division of textbooks in middle school social studies and the separate listing of four subjects, specifically geography, social sciences, history and morals. The issues revealed in this study provide beneficial implications for future social studies curriculum development, revision as well as the development of future research.