An Analysis of Diffusion of Teacher-curated Resources on Pinterest

Teachers increasingly rely on online social media platforms to supplement their educational resources, greatly influencing PK-12 education through the swift and extensive diffusion of teacher-curated resources. Understanding this diffusion process is crucial, but current educational studies primarily report resource diffusion through small-scale analyses, such as teacher interviews or anecdotal accounts. To bridge this gap, we conduct a pioneering, large-scale, quantitative, and data-driven analysis of the diffusion of teacher-curated resources on Pinterest, a platform widely embraced by educators. Our study begins by defining a resource's diffusion tree, which encapsulates the cascade of resource sharing across the social network. Based on this diffusion tree, we identify three measures to characterize a resource's diffusion process: volume, virality, and velocity. Equipped with these three measures, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the diffusion of over one million resources curated by thousands of teachers on Pinterest. Our investigation concludes by examining the correlation between a resource's attributes and its curator's attributes and the diffusion of the resource.