A Systematic Literature Review of Empirical Research on Epistemic Network Analysis in Education

Abstract

Over the past decade, epistemic network analysis (ENA) has emerged as a quantitative ethnography tool for modeling discourse in different types of human behaviors. This article offers a comprehensive systematic review of ENA educational applications in empirical studies ($\text{n}=76$) published between 2010 and 2021. We review the ENA methods that research has relied on, the use of educational theories, their method of application, comparisons across groups and the main findings. Our results show that ENA has helped visually model the coded interactions and illustrate the connection strength among elements of network models. The applications of ENA have expanded beyond discourse analysis to several new areas of inquiry such as modeling surveys, log files or game play. Most of the reviewed articles used ENA based on educational theories and frameworks ($\text{n}=53$, 69.7%), with one or more theories per article, while 23 articles (30.3%) did not report theoretical grounding. The implementation of ENA has enabled comparisons across groups and helped augment the insights of other methods such as process mining, however there is little evidence that studies have exploited the quantitative potential of ENA. Most of the reviewed studies used ENA on small sample size with manually coded interactions with few examples of large samples and automated coding.