Education Commons^™

U.S. State Education Agencies’ Use Of Twitter: Mission Accomplished?, Yinying Wang

Educational Policy Studies Faculty Publications

This study examined how Twitter was used by all U.S. state education agencies (SEAs) for public engagement in education. Drawing on the ecological model of communication, this study analyzed the latest 71,913 tweets from 40 SEAs that had official Twitter accounts. The results of correlation analysis indicate no significant relationship between the SEAs’ presence on Twitter and the SEAs’ targeted Twitter users, denoting that the SEAs’ well-intentioned efforts in communicating with stakeholders and the public by using Twitter might fall short of the public’s preferable medium for receiving information. In addition, the results of content analysis suggest that the SEAs …

Mapping The Field Of Educational Administration Research: A Journal Citation Network Analysis, Yinying Wang, Alex J. Bowers

Educational Policy Studies Faculty Publications

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to uncover how knowledge is exchanged and disseminated in the educational administration research literature through the journal citation network.

Research Methods: Drawing upon social network theory and citation network studies in other disciplines, we constructed an educational administration journal citation network by extracting all 157,372 citations from 5,359 journal articles in 30 educational administration journals from 2009 to 2013. We then performed social network analysis to visualize the network structure by journal clusters, and quantified journal prominence and interdisciplinarity by calculating Freeman indegree and betweenness, respectively. In addition to journal-to-journal citations, we examined …

A Social Network Approach To Examine K-12 Educational Leaders’ Influence On Information Diffusion On Twitter, Yinying Wang, Nicholas Sauers, Jayson W. Richardson

Educational Policy Studies Faculty Publications

This study investigated the relationship between the leader’s gender, leadership position, Twitter use, and influence on information diffusion in the communication network on Twitter. We collected the 30,200 latest tweets of 151 active Twitter users who held educational leadership positions. Results of social network analysis and multiple regression analyses suggest a gender inequality in the leader’s influence on information diffusion in the network. Findings also indicate no significant relationship between leadership position (district vs. building) and a leader's influence in the network. Moreover, Twitter following was positively associated with the leader’s influence in the network, whereas the number of followers, …

Getting Personal! Twitter Communication Between School Districts, Superintendents, And The Public, Yinying Wang

Educational Policy Studies Faculty Publications

The purpose of this study is to examine the Twitter communication between school districts, superintendents, and the public. Content analysis of the tweets posted by the 100 largest U.S. school districts and those district superintendents was performed to investigate how the districts and the superintendents communicated with the public on Twitter. Next, paired sample f-tests were performed to compare the differences between public sentiment toward the districts and the superintendents. The findings suggest that the districts and their superintendents primarily used Twitter for one-way information broadcasting, leaving Twitter’s two-way communication functionality largely untapped. Further, the public expressed significantly less negative …