#640: Bridging Curriculum and Creativity: NLP-Powered Semantic Analysis for Knowledge Building

Knowledge Building is a collaborative approach that treats ideas as improvable knowledge artifacts and engages learners in advancing collective understanding. To support this, educators need analytics that reveal deep discourse patterns. This paper introduces a semantic analysis tool for Knowledge Building that uses natural language processing to illuminate conceptual dynamics in student-generated content. The tool takes a glossary of curriculum terms and student notes, preprocesses text with spaCy, and computes semantic similarities using a transformer model. By analyzing word-to-term relationships, it identifies curriculum coverage, related concepts beyond official terms, and evidence of conceptual growth. We outline the tool’s design, demonstrate its outputs through network visualizations, and discuss implications for formative assessment, curriculum design, and longitudinal tracking, positioning it as a flexible analytic for studying and fostering knowledge-creating discourse.