A Comparative Analysis of Reflective Reports by Japanese, Chinese, and Vietnamese Students: A Text Mining Approach

Reflective practice is crucial for deepening learning in Intercultural Collaborative Learning (ICL), yet how students’ cultural backgrounds shape these reflections remains under-explored. This study examines how Japanese, Chinese, and Vietnamese students differently conceptualize the same ICL experience. Short reflective reports of approximately 400 Japanese characters were collected from 32 students enrolled in an “Intercultural Collaborative Discussion” course at a Japanese university. Using KH Coder for text mining, the study applied Correspondence Analysis and Co-occurrence Network Analysis to visualize latent structures in student discourse. The results suggested three distinct reflective orientations within this specific classroom context: Japanese students tended to emphasize emotional and interpersonal aspects, navigating the tension between “fun” and “difficulty”; Chinese students tended to frame the course as a cognitively “valuable” opportunity, focusing on knowledge acquisition; and Vietnamese students tended to prioritize the instructor’s facilitation and class structure, suggesting a teacher-centered interpretation. These findings demonstrate that even concise reflective tasks can reveal culturally shaped differences in processing shared classroom experiences. This study highlights text mining as a valuable tool for faculty development and suggests that educators should design reflection activities that accommodate diverse reflective styles in multicultural higher education.