Research trends in programming education: A systematic review of the articles published between 2012-2020

Abstract

This study examines the methodological dimensions of programming education articles published in educational sciences journals indexed in SSCI by exploring their general trends. To do this, 162 articles published between January 2012 and February 2020 in 30 international journals indexed in SSCI were analyzed with a systematic review method using the "Educational Technology Publication Classification Form" as a data collection tool. The results revealed that most of the studies in this field were conducted in the United States and Turkiye. The number of these studies has increased since 2015, and those studies were carried out using quantitative research methodology. Mostly questionnaires and achievement tests were used as a data collection tool, a convenience sampling method was used, and descriptive analyses were adopted to analyze the data. As a result, the articles examined in this study showed that programming education positively contributes to learners' learning and success levels and the development of their computational thinking skills. We believe that these results will shed light on future studies related to programming education.