Patent Statistics and Analysis of Development Trends of Technology-Assisted Instruction †

Patents and related statistics are the indicators of technological progress. There have been controversial discussions about the value of patents as an indicator of technological advancement. Patent research has been conducted for research and development to develop the core framework of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. This study was conducted to classify the patents in terms of technology-assisted instruction using the Patent Co-citation Analysis (PCA) method and factor analysis. For the analysis, education, demonstration, rendition, instructional aids, instructional equipment, teaching aids, and didactic materials were chosen as keywords to construct a citation relationship network of patents and to classify core patent issues. The study results showed that 225 patents were cited more than 25 times. They were classified into 11 categories. The result provided information on the development and application of technology-assisted education to develop teaching tools further.