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People, Ideas, Milestones: A Scientometric Study of Computational Thinking

Authors:

Solomon sunday Oyelere,

Matti TedreAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE), Volume 21, Issue 3

Article No.: 20, Pages 1 - 17

https://doi.org/10.1145/3445984

Published: 02 March 2021 Publication History

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Abstract

The momentum around computational thinking (CT) has kindled a rising wave of research initiatives and scholarly contributions seeking to capitalize on the opportunities that CT could bring. A number of literature reviews 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 its directions, 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 its main themes of research, international collaborations, influential authors, and seminal publications, and how authors and publications have influenced one another. The metadata of 1,874 documents were retrieved from the 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, a number 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.

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Index Terms

People, Ideas, Milestones: A Scientometric Study of Computational Thinking
1. Applied computing
  1. Education

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Computing Education

ACM Transactions on Computing Education Volume 21, Issue 3

September 2021

188 pages

EISSN:1946-6226

DOI:10.1145/3452111

Editor:
Chris Hundhausen
Washington State University, USA

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Copyright © 2021 Association for Computing Machinery.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 02 March 2021

Accepted: 01 December 2020

Revised: 01 November 2020

Received: 01 April 2020

Published in TOCE Volume 21, Issue 3

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Cited By

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3686165
Adanır GDelen IGulbahar Y(2024)Research trends in K-5 computational thinking education: a bibliometric analysis and ideas to move forwardEducation and Information Technologies10.1007/s10639-023-11974-429:3(3589-3614)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10639-023-11974-4
Wong G(2024)Amplifying children’s computational problem-solving skills: A hybrid-based design for programming educationEducation and Information Technologies10.1007/s10639-023-11880-929:2(1761-1793)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10639-023-11880-9
Saqr MRaspopovic Milic MPancheva KJovic JPeltekova EConde M(2024)A multimethod synthesis of Covid-19 education research: the tightrope between covidization and meaningfulnessUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-023-00989-w23:3(1163-1176)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2024
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González-Pizarro FLópez CVásquez ACastro C(2023)Inequalities in Computational Thinking Among Incoming Students in an STEM Chilean UniversityIEEE Transactions on Education10.1109/TE.2023.333419367:2(180-189)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2023
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Zha SJin YWheeler RBosarge E(2022)A mixed-method cluster analysis of physical computing and robotics integration in middle-grade math lesson plansComputers & Education10.1016/j.compedu.2022.104623190:COnline publication date: 1-Dec-2022
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