Curricular evaluation of “SHOKUIKU program” as a postgraduate minor course of food and nutrition education using a text-mining procedure

BACKGROUND: “SHOKUIKU”, food and nutrition education, is a national promotion to enable people to acquire an adequate knowledge of SHOKU (which include food, nutrition, dietary habits, etc.) in Japanese society and to allow people to make appropriate SHOKU choices in Japan. In order to educate SHOKUIKU experts who can promote evidence-based SHOKUIKU with advanced professional knowledge and skills, an original “SHOKUIKU program” was established. To evaluate this program, a short answer questionnaire was given to students. Results were objectively analyzed by text mining procedures. METHODS: Five hundred forty four comment papers submitted by a total of 52 consenting students after each lecture in the 12 omnibus-style lectures were examined as cross-sectional data. A total of 2507 sentences were decomposed into words, and word classes of morpheme in Japanese were properly specified. Subsequently, on the basis of a constructed keyword data base, 123 morphemes with high frequency were investigated with co-occurrence network analysis. Furthermore, multivariate network analyses according to the student’s major were performed. RESULTS: Students majoring in food and nutritional sciences recognized that evidence-based SHOKUIKU is “difficult” but “necessary” to “convey” reliable information at “actual” SHOKUIKU sites. On the other hand, students studying other majors not only got an “interesting” opportunity to “learn” “nutrition” and “eating habits” but also thought about their own SHOKUIKU promotion in relation to their major. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that the students of the Food Course assumed that they would practice the evidence-based SHOKUIKU themselves, while the students of other courses learned new knowledge more passively. The results also confirmed that students comprehensively grasped the 12 omnibus-style lectures and understood the significance of evidence-based SHOKUIKU regardless of their major. Our original educational program could be valuable for postgraduate students to promote SHOKUIKU.