Categorising computer science education research

The interdisciplinary nature of Computer Science Education as a field of study is a complicating factor when authors are choosing appropriate journals and conferences for publishing research results. This paper reports a survey of 42 such publications in order to identify the types of paper frequently accepted for publication in each. We review existing taxonomies developed for the general fields of Computer Science and Education, and from this starting point, we develop a novel faceted taxonomy, specifically aimed to help new researchers in the field understand what types of papers are published and where they appear. Our results confirm previous studies indicating the predominance of practice-based, technology-driven reports. We also observe certain differences in educational themes between those found in publications grounded in the Computer Science Education corpus and those emerging from more general Higher Education literature.