Topical Analysis of Programming Education Research Literature

Abstract

Programming is taught globally in universities and in a large number of countries, also in schools, often associated with learning computational thinking. It is therefore natural that programming education research is the widest research area within Computing Education Research. Much of this research has taken place and published in conferences and journals associated with the ACM SIGCSE community. However, research related to teaching and learning programming is also published in numerous other venues, which are associated, for example, with the IEEE Computer or IEEE Education societies and other organizations within the fields of engineering education, science education, and educational sciences. Previous general reviews in programming education research have largely focused on the introductory programming level. However, there is much work published addressing more advanced topical areas, too. In this article, the goal is to look at the global situation covering programming education research at different levels. Based on the analysis of over 30,000 papers from the Scopus database addressing computing education and computing education research, we identified 9,865 papers focusing on programming education, published between 1967 and 2023. We describe this filtered dataset and report the results of topic modelling based on titles, abstracts, and keywords in this dataset. We identified 27 topical areas, which form 7 broader themes of research: CS1 and CS2, computing in schools, advanced topics, pedagogy and objectives, evaluation, digital and physical facilities, as well as investigation. We describe work in each of these areas, how research activity has developed in the areas over the decades, how the topics are related to each other, and how work in different areas is more likely to be published in specific conferences and journals/magazines in the field.