Report on CS Education Research Literature 2005-2014

A classification of research into computer science education in school from 2005-2014: Initial report, Sue Sentance and Cynthia Selby, October 2015.

The field of computer science education has been around for some time (since the 1970s) with a particular focus on beginners and how they learn to program. In the main, a "beginner" has been a student at university; there is a large body of research on ways to support understanding at this stage and also around the issue of retaining students. Many software environments have been developed over the years to support undergraduates in grasping the fundamental concepts of the subject. Some research has also focused on pedagogy but to a lesser extent. There are several conferences that academics in this area frequent and a few journals which include theoretical articles on the state of knowledge in this field, for example, ACM Transactions in Computing Education, Computer Science Education and Computers & Education.

In this study we sought to look at the papers published in 5 conference proceedings and 2 journals over a period of 10 years, 2005-2014. This resulted in a large number of papers (over 2000) which have been classified according to their theme, findings, scale, age group discussed, country of first author, year and publication. In the attached report we have described how the papers are classified and also give some illustrations of how this data could be used to look more deeply into the field. This is not the end of this work and in phase 2 we will be looking more deeply at particular areas of the literature around computer science education in school.

This work was funded by a grant from Microsoft Research UK to whom we are very grateful. We are also grateful to Laura Heels for her help with some of the classifying and Simon Peyton Jones for feedback.

Sue Sentance and Cynthia Selby