Characteristics of studies conducted on computational thinking: A content analysis

Abstract

The skill of computational thinking (CT) is important both in computer science education and in the teaching of programming skills. This skill, which has been taught since early childhood for some, continues to be taught to different age groups via different approaches and methods. For this reason, the skill has been the subject of many research studies for academics working in this field. The purpose of the current study is to examine studies in computational thinking in a systematic way and to present a history of such research, together with new research trends in the area. In this context, keywords in the concept of computational thinking were systematically searched in databases and digital libraries of ScienceDirect and the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. The study described in this paper explored the literature on computational thinking and described the demographic characteristics of this literature in terms of its characteristics, methods, design and data analysis. According to the results, the number of studies mostly increases in parallel with the year of publication. The sample in the study shows that studies were performed with any group directly related to this topic. When the keywords were examined, it was seen that ‘computational thinking’ was the most preferred keyword, the second was ‘programming’ and third was ‘teaching and learning strategies’. When studies on the instructional methods and tools of CT were examined, it was found that most of them were about STEAM, block-based and robotic applications. The most used method in the various studies was that of case study. In addition to this method, experimental designs, survey type and qualitative studies were the other types of methods used.