Data Mining and Learning Analytics

CHAPTER 14 A NEW WAY OF SEEING: USING A DATA MINING APPROACH TO UNDERSTAND CHILDREN’S VIEWS OF DIVERSITY AND “DIFFERENCE” IN PICTURE BOOKS

Robin A. Moeller¹ and Hsin‐liang Chen²

¹ Department of Leadership and Educational Studies, Appalachian State University, Reich College of Education, Boone, NC, USA

² Palmer School of Library and Information Science, Long Island University, Brookville, NY, USA

14.1 INTRODUCTION

At the time of this writing, the United States is in the midst of a conversation about the relationship between African American men and police officers. At the heart of this conversation lies the question of how police officers perceive the guilt and threat level of African American men based on their gender and the color of their skin. This isn’t the first time that the United States has engaged in the discussion of our assumptions of people based on the color of their skin. In 2011, the national news network CNN cosponsored a study regarding US children’s perceptions of other children with a focus on variations of skin tones. In this chapter, we describe our own research in which we used a methodology grounded in data mining to better understand the nature and tone of the comments from CNN’s online audience on this story and how those findings influenced further research on popular children’s literature when we evaluated the topic of “difference.” Particularly, we were interested in how the public would react to the news story in which a majority of children ...