People, Ideas, Milestones: A Scientometric Study of Computational Thinking
2021 (English)In: ACM Transactions on Computing Education, E-ISSN 1946-6226, Vol. 21, no 3, article id 20Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
The momentum around computational thinking (CT) has kindled a rising wave of research initiatives andscholarly contributions seeking to capitalize on the opportunities that CT could bring. A number of literaturereviews have showed a vibrant community of practitioners and a growing number of publications. However,the history and evolution of the emerging research topic, the milestone publications that have shaped itsdirections, and the timeline of the important developments may be better told through a quantitative, scientometric narrative. This article presents a bibliometric analysis of the drivers of the CT topic, as well as itsmain themes of research, international collaborations, influential authors, and seminal publications, and howauthors and publications have influenced one another. The metadata of 1,874 documents were retrieved fromthe Scopus database using the keyword “computational thinking.” The results show that CT research has been US-centric from the start, and continues to be dominated by US researchers both in volume and impact. International collaboration is relatively low, but clusters of joint research are found between, for example, anumber of Nordic countries, lusophone- and hispanophone countries, and central European countries. The results show that CT features the computing’s traditional tripartite disciplinary structure (design, modeling, and theory), a distinct emphasis on programming, and a strong pedagogical and educational backdrop including constructionism, self-efficacy, motivation, and teacher training.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 2021. Vol. 21, no 3, article id 20
Keywords [en]
Computational thinking, bibliometric research, history, scientometrics, literature review, computing education research, computer science education
National Category
Computer and Information Sciences Computer and Information Sciences
Research subject
Pervasive Mobile Computing
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:ltu:diva-83141DOI: 10.1145/3445984ISI: 000669690000004OAI: oai:DiVA.org:ltu-83141DiVA, id: diva2:1532887
Note
Validerad;2021;Nivå 2;2021-07-28 (beamah)
2021-03-032021-03-032025-02-18Bibliographically approved