An Examination of Empirical Evidence Produced by a Decade of K-12 Computer Science Education Research

Problem. This full research paper describes the results of a literature review of data collected about K-12 computer science education research and initiatives. Over the last ten years, K-12 computer science (CS) education research has evolved to meet the needs and progress of the computer science education community. As a field, however, we have no empirical evidence of what this evolution is and how it has managed to produce the empirical evidence needed to support the long-term goals of computing education research as computing education grows into every primary and secondary classroom. Research Question. Our question for this study was How has K-12 CS education research evolved over the last decade, including when examining the research based on standards and inclusion of student participants? Methodology. Using a publicly available database of curated articles documenting K-12 computing education research efforts, queries were run to extract pre-specified subsets of data. Descriptive statistics were calculated to identify trends to support answers to the research question. Findings. We consider how this data reflects on changes in the last decade in light of the CS for All initiatives, including the fact that less than 5% of studies include students with disabilities and less than 20% of studies report participants' socioeconomic status. With the growth of computing in schools in the last decade, it is important to consider previous computing experience of students when analyzing results, but our data shows that only 40% of studies do. Implications. The good news is that this increase means that more topics, contexts, and student subgroups can be explored each year, and new insights on best practices are likely to arise from these findings. The bad news is that the attention to the needs of historically marginalized groups is not increasing at the same pace. While our data shows modest to gradual increases in the percent of research articles that report on factors such as the student race and instructor gender, these factors are still rarely reported, which may make it more difficult to ensure that CS education research involves a wide diversity of participants.