《特殊教育法》修正公布前後時期新聞報導之趨勢與主題演變：以2021年至2025年為期之文字探勘分析

Trends and Thematic Shifts in News Coverage Before Versus After Special Education Act Amendment: A Text Mining Analysis from 2021 to 2025

本研究旨在探討《特殊教育法》修正公布前後時期新聞報導之特徵，以文字探勘分析報導篇數趨勢、主題模型及情緒傾向。因現有研究多聚焦於法治脈絡、條文詮釋與實施成效，較少從社會脈動與媒體論述進行探討，透過本研究補足相關研究空白。研究資料取自8家臺灣主流網路新聞媒體，以「特殊教育法」與「特教法」為關鍵詞，蒐集2021年1月至2025年4月間之新聞，共計52個月，經篩選與清理後取得有效文本333篇。分析方法採次數分配、結構式主題模型與情緒傾向分析。研究結果顯示：一、新聞報導數量在修正公布前150篇，修正公布後183篇，單月最高峰為2023年4月（45篇），其餘高峰亦與教育事件或政治人物相關，顯示重大時事對報導數量具有推動作用。二、主題模型結果整體時期可歸納為「人力資源」、「身障學生處境」、「制度執行與爭議」及「特教權益」等四大核心議題；而在修正公布前聚焦於「制度執行與爭議」、「資優政策與入學爭議」、「人力資源」、「社會支持」及「鑑定工作與教師負荷」等議題，反映制度建構與現場基礎面向；修正公布後則轉向「學生需求」、「政治議題」、「家庭支持」、「政策推動」及「人力資源」，說明媒體關注逐漸聚焦於政策落實與社會回應。三、情緒分析顯示整體時期以正向情緒為主（占63.36%），修正公布前正向情緒占58.67%，修正公布後上升至67.21%，顯示法案修正公布後之新聞報導語調趨於正面，多採以肯定與支持的角度敘寫。本研究根據結果提出建議，作為後續政策發展與研究參考之用。

Rationale & Purpose: Special education is both a barometer of a nation’s educational progress and a practical route to equity through the provision of differentiated learning. In Taiwan, the Special Education Act (SEA) is the central legal framework that institutionalizes rights, budgets, roles, and governance for learners with disabilities and giftedness. Since its enactment in 1984, the SEA has been revised three times—in 1997, 2009, and most recently 2023—and undergone multiple partial amendments. The 2023 revision, which aligned the SEA with the Conventions on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the Rights of the Child, marked a notable turn toward participation rights, universal design, and reasonable accommodation. In addition, special schools were transformed into regional resource centers. Against this evolving legal backdrop, Taiwan’s news media have increasingly served not merely as information conduits but as influential policy actors that set and frame agendas to amplify certain topics, shape public perceptions, and exert pressure on legislative and executive processes. The legislative process surrounding the 2023 SEA revision was accompanied by intense media attention to teacher workload, staffing ratios, inclusive education gaps, and resource adequacy, suggesting that the news environment both mirrored and molded the policy conversation. In this study, we investigated portrayals of the SEA by Taiwan’s mainstream online news media during the period surrounding the 2023 comprehensive revision. Through text mining, we explored trends in article volume, topic evolution, and sentiment to address the following questions: (1) How did the number and timing of SEA-related news reports change before and after the revised act was promulgated on June 21, 2023? (2) What thematic structures characterized SEA-related coverage from 2021–2025 and before versus after promulgation? (3) How did the emotional valence of reporting shift throughout these temporal stages? This investigation illuminates how media discourse influences policy construction and implementation, thereby offering empirically grounded guidance for future public communication and policy rollout strategies. Beyond descriptive mapping, the study integrates agenda-setting and framing theories with computational text mining from a policy communication perspective, clarifying how legal milestones intersect with mediated narratives and how those narratives condition the reception and perceived legitimacy of reform. Methods: SEA-related news reports published between January 2021 and April 2025 were analyzed through text mining. Eight leading online outlets in Taiwan were selected as data sources, and articles were retrieved with the keywords“特殊教育法＂(Special Education Act) and“特教法＂(SEA). After screening, 333 valid articles were included in the analysis. The promulgation of the revised SEA on June 21, 2023, served as the dividing point between the before (150 articles) and after (183 articles) periods. Latent Dirichlet allocation was applied for topic modeling and dictionary-based sentiment analysis, enabling systematic identification of articles’thematic structures and affective orientations over time. During model selection, this study prioritized perplexity and semantic coherence; interpretability was verified through iterative reading to ensure label robustness. Results/Findings: SEA coverage was highly event-driven, with notable peaks in reporting observed during April and May 2023, March and May 2024, and December 2024. These surges corresponded to the timing of legislative debates, amendment passage, prominent school incidents, and implementation updates, highlighting the agenda-setting role of the media. These timing patterns reveal a predictable alignment between the legislative calendar and incident-driven coverage: salience intensifies at decision points, amplifying perceived policy importance, and later ebbs during implementation lulls. Topic modeling throughout the full study period yielded four dominant themes: human resource constraints, the lived experiences of students with disabilities, implementation controversies (e.g., regarding evaluation and budgeting), and rights and protections linked to inclusion and accessibility. A clear temporal shift was noted in these discourses before versus after promulgation. Before the 2023 amendment, coverage focused heavily on institutional disputes regarding evaluation regimes, admissions fairness in gifted education, and teacher workload in terms of assessment and identification tasks; family burdens; and insufficient social support. After amendment passage, reporting focused on the realities of implementation, including how individual education plans and counseling address student needs, familial perception of and engagement with new policies, the Ministry of Education’s communication of the reforms, and the mobilization of disability rights language by political representatives. Across both periods, human resource shortages and workload pressures remained a persistent theme, highlighting chronic structural challenges. Human resource concerns therefore operated as a cross-phase anchor theme and a practical bottleneck, perceived as attenuating the benefits of otherwise rights-advancing legal change unless addressed directly. Sentiment analysis confirmed these dynamics. Across the full sample, positive reports (63.36%) outnumbered negative reports (36.34%). Before promulgation, this balance was less favorable (58.67% positive vs. 40.67% negative), reflecting contentious debate and uncertainty. After promulgation, the proportion of positive reports rose to 67.21% (versus 32.79% negative reports), indicating that the media climate became more supportive and emphasized expectations for improvement and constructive monitoring. Positive reports involved the keywords“support,”“assistance,”“hope,”and“improvement,”whereas negative reports involved the keywords“problems,”“insufficiency,”and“burden.”Conclusions/Implications: This study demonstrated that both legislative milestones and broader sociopolitical contexts have shaped media discourse surrounding Taiwan’s SEA. Coverage surged surrounding amendment debates, legislative passage, and implementation challenges, reflecting the agenda-setting power of news media. Topic modeling revealed a structural transition from contentious debates over institutional design before the 2023 amendment to an implementation- and student-centered focus thereafter. Sentiment analysis further indicated that whereas discourses before promulgation discourse involved negativity linked to uncertainty and structural concerns, reporting became more positive and constructive after promulgation, suggesting that the amendment was generally well received by the media. These findings underscore the role of news media in both reflecting public opinion and actively framing educational reform. The discursive environment evolved from critical scrutiny to constructive expectation, indicating that media narratives can shape the social legitimacy and perceived success of policy reforms. For policymakers, educators, and advocacy groups, these results highlight the need to view media not simply as a communication outlet but as a partner in reform. Proactive, transparent communication regarding staffing, resources, and progress can build public trust, and sustained attention to human resource challenges and family support are necessary to bridge the gap between legal mandates and school-level realities. Practically, advocacy groups can leverage predictable coverage peaks to disseminate guidance, counter misinformation, and foreground lived experiences, and researchers can pair computational modeling with qualitative frame analysis to trace mechanisms linking media framing to policy uptake and implementation. This study provides valuable insights into how educational reforms gain acceptance, how media framing can amplify or constrain policy momentum, and how strategic engagement with news media can better advance inclusive education discourse.