T-TExTS (Teaching Text Expansion for Teacher Scaffolding): Enhancing Text Selection in High School Literature through Knowledge Graph-Based Recommendation

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Abstract High school English teachers often encounter barriers to assembling diverse, thematically aligned text sets due to limited planning time and pedagogical resources. To address this need, we present T-TExTS (Teaching Text Expansion for Teacher Scaffolding), a knowledge graph (KG)-based recommendation system that suggests Literature texts based on pedagogical merit rather than surface-level metadata. We construct a domain-specific ontology using the Knowledge Acquisition and Representation Methodology (KNARM), instantiate it as a knowledge graph with separate Terminological Box (TBox) and Assertional Box (ABox) components, and evaluate four graph embedding strategies (DeepWalk, biased random walk, hybrid embedding, and Node2Vec) across three dataset configurations (98, 196, and 351 texts) and two relation-weighting schemes. The experimental results reveal that traversal-level expert weighting alone does not outperform algorithmic structural tuning: Node2Vec achieves the highest Area Under the Curve (AUC) at every dataset size (0.9642–0.9750) and the strongest ranking metrics (Hits@K, MRR, nDCG) at larger scales. Combining structural and pedagogical signals through embedding concatenation, however, preserves both interpretability and competitive ranking quality, with the hybrid model maintaining a high AUC across all scales (0.9122–0.9350) and remaining within a few percentage points of Node2Vec on every ranking metric. These findings highlight the value of ontology-driven knowledge graph embeddings for educational recommendation systems and demonstrate that T-TExTS can meaningfully ease the burden of English Literature text selection for secondary educators, supporting more informed and inclusive curricular decisions. The source code for T-TExTS is available at https://github.com/koncordantlab/TTExTS .