Constructing a core literature for computing education research

Abstract

After four decades of research on a broad range of topics, computing education has now emerged as a mature research community, with its own journals, conferences, and monographs. Despite this success, the computing education research community still lacks a commonly recognized core literature. A core literature can help a research community to develop a common orientation and make it easier for new researchers to enter the community. This paper proposes an approach to constructing and maintaining a core literature for computing education research. It includes a model for classifying research contributions and a methodology for determining whether they should be included in the core. The model and methodology have been applied to produce an initial list of core papers. An annotated list of these papers is given in appendix A.