The present study seeks to map and visualize up-to-date perspectives of the topic of active learning by analyzing and interpreting the different elements that make up learning ecosystems within the European Higher Education Area. With this aim, scientometric methods were employed to analyze a sample of 474 articles recovered from Web of Science (WoS) during the three-year period between 2018 and 2020. All articles examined the topic of active learning. Keywords (authors’ keywords and ‘keywords plus’) from the manuscripts were examined through co-occurrence analysis in order to establish the conceptual structure of active learning. Among the different trends and emerging topics identified, there is an important presence of topics related to technology applied to the field of education, where digital contexts acquire a preponderant role in current education. These innovative changes focused on the digital updating and exploitation of technology represent a methodological challenge that requires an involvement and commitment to this new space for educational practice by teachers and students.

Purpose This paper aims to identify emerging fronts and hot topics in educational research. The identification of such educational trends can help decision-makers in educational policies and research agendas. Design/methodology/approach Through a quantitative and scientometric research approach, the authors analyze a sample of 198 highly cited scientific papers extracted from Web of Science corresponding to the 2012-2016 period using a co-verbal analysis to process the papers’ keywords and titles. The result of the co-occurrence analysis is further processed to generate clusters and visualize network maps that allow identifying the different emerging fronts and hot topics. Findings The results indicate that there exist pervasive and generalist topics, thus denoting the perennial nature of some themes within the education research discipline; which coexist with other more specific themes that center the focus of attention in more specific and actual topics that also attract the interest of researchers as technology, assessment, strategies or environment. These emergent fronts could conform a plausible research agenda educational research agenda. Originality/value The authors contribute a method to infer emerging fronts and hot topics of research and have used it to identify the novel avenues of educational research that may guide the agendas in the near future. In the scientific literature, they find studies and reports on fronts and topics mainly within the broader framework of social sciences. Here, the main focus of attention is placed on education as a scientific discipline on its own.

Las tecnologías de la información y comunicación pueden ser una herramienta para el desarrollo de valores sociales y educativos que faciliten a los jóvenes en dificultad social las oportunidades necesarias para su inclusión en la sociedad contemporánea. Desde esta perspectiva, se plantea un trabajo cuyo objetivo es investigar las experiencias de ocio digital de los jóvenes en dificultad social para descubrir las oportunidades educativas que se pueden implementar en el colectivo a través de actividades de ocio sostenidas en el entorno tecnológico. Es un estudio cualitativo que utiliza como instrumentos de recogida de datos las entrevistas abiertas realizadas a 78 informantes. Entre los resultados relevantes obtenidos destaca que este colectivo de jóvenes de exclusión social permanece en conexión constante con los amigos a través de su Smartphone. Mediante el uso continuado de este dispositivo alternan sus ocupaciones laborales, familiares y formativas con las redes sociales e internet para buscar, entre otras acciones, información sobre famosos o “YouTubers” de moda para copiar su comportamiento y estilo personal. Por ello, se concluye con el análisis sobre un enfoque educativo que utilice estos dispositivos como medio para trabajar, con los jóvenes en dificultad social, alternativas educativas de ocio digital que les faciliten oportunidades para el desarrollo de actuaciones en la red, cuyo valor para el crecimiento personal y social posibilite nuevas oportunidades para la inclusión en la sociedad.

This study seeks to explore the different knowledge structures in the sphere of educational research into COVID-19 during 2020. Using bibliometric methods, analysis was performed of a sample of 308 scientific articles retrieved from the Web of Science database. Using different data analysis techniques combining co-occurrence analysis, co-citation analysis and factorial analysis, All Keywords and Keywords Plus were used to achieve the main research objective: identification of the main themes and trends of production in the sphere of educational research into COVID-19. The main findings of this study in terms of the conceptual structure show that analysis of the centrality and density of the thematic trends points to a generalised structural change in the entire educational system towards methodological teaching–learning procedures oriented towards distance education. As for the intellectual structure, among the host of authors and sources of information involved only a select few have a greater influence on the scientific community. Finally, in terms of social structure, there is limited collaboration between authors and institutions from different countries. However, this collaboration is more intense within countries themselves and in terms of their own production, with the USA being the country with the strongest links.

Using a quantitative–bibliometric methodology, this study attempted to locate from which perspectives the study of religiosity is being approached in the scientific world, in order to achieve traceability for recent research using the following keywords—religiosity, gender, age, ethnicity and social life—locating possible future directions as well as fields of study yet to be discovered, and studying the evolution of scientific research on religiosity in the social sciences in the last 25 years. According to the results obtained in the Scopus database from the literature on concepts such as family, culture, spirituality, identity, marriage and sexuality, we discovered that the research revolved around six main components: education, mental health, attitudes, psychological aspects, religion and gender.