Examining students' interaction with mathematics consultation using text mining

There has always been a requirement for learning support in mathematics and statistics in tertiary education and the need for support in universities in Australia is increasing rapidly. Mathematics Education Support Hub at Western Sydney University provides support to students at the libraries in all campuses to increase their understanding, knowledge and abilities in numeracy, mathematics, statistics and assists all students regardless of program whether undergraduate or not. Team collects data on every consultation from the very beginning. This study examines tutor's explanations about the students' query on every consultation between 2013 and 2017 to work out the topics that students struggle the most and seek help during their degree. Useful information from the documents are extracted and processed by R as a text mining tool. Research showed that, interestingly but not surprisingly, the main topics where students seek help appears to be almost the same for all levels of study