Exploring four decades of research in Computers & Education

Helping doctoral students crack the publication code: An evaluation and content analysis of the Australasian Journal of Educational Technology

“…Research published in AJET in 2013-2017 has become more student-centred (Bond & Buntins, 2018), focusing in particular on teacher knowledge and skill development to strengthen teaching and learning, as well as on collaborative learning in online environments, echoing a previous analysis of AJET (McDonald & Loke, 2016) and research in the wider educational technology field (e.g., Marin, Duart, Galvis, & ZawackiRichter, 2018;Zawacki-Richter, et al, 2017;Zawacki-Richter & Latchem, 2018). AJET publications during this period used a relatively even mix of inferential, interpretative, and combined methods (Bond & Buntins, 2018), showing less methodological bias than in other educational technology journals (Perez-Sanagustin, et al, 2017;.…”

“…This study was conducted using both qualitative and quantitative methods, and seeks to build upon the existing body of educational technology journal research, by exploring how computer-assisted content analysis using the text-mining software Leximancer (Zawacki-Richter & Latchem, 2018) can be used to analyse other article and journal components, aside from titles and abstracts. Whilst titles and abstracts are "lexically dense and focus on the core issues presented in articles" (Cretchley, Rooney, & Galois, 2010, p. 319), they are limited in size and often do not go into sufficient detail about future research directions.…”

“…The thematic summary reveals that learning has the most direct mentions within the text with 1,197 (100% relative count), followed by students (98%), study (93%), teachers (56%), learners (17%), feedback (12%), content (12%), information (11%) and access (7%). There are five key areas of focus identified for future research: (1) the development of teachers' technology skills and TPACK (teachers-education-developmenttechnology-teaching-need-skills and teachers/pre-service-knowledge-practices/content); (2) the development of quality content (resources-effective-support-activities-learning-environment); (3) student accessibility to learning (access-time-student-learning-mobile), (4) the impact of learning environments on cognition (cognitive-learners-system-participants-social-learning-environment); and (5) the role of feedback (feedback-students-online-communication), which was also found to be prevalent in CAE (Zawacki-Richter & Latchem, 2018). The following is a list of areas for future research in the field of educational technology, as suggested by authors published in AJET during 2017.…”

An analysis of the Australasian Journal of Educational Technology 2013-2017

“…These were also found in the analyses of Computers & Education (CAE) (Zawacki-Richter & Latchem, 2018), Distance Education (Zawacki-Richter & Naidu, 2016) and the IJETHE (Marin et al, 2018). Whilst learning environments were also found to be a focus in the comprehensive analysis by Hsu et al (2012), in addition emphasis was placed on teachers, with the pedagogical use of technology and the effectiveness of instructional design the most frequent research topic.…”

“…The analysis of articles published in AJET in 2013-2017 has confirmed a growing trend that educational technology research has become more student-centred (Marin et al, 2018;Zawacki-Richter & Latchem, 2018) since the Hadlock et al (2014) analysis, and that there has been a rise in the number of studies researching online learning environments, and teacher knowledge and skill development. This reflects the journal shift towards higher education-only research, due in part to the widespread use of learning management systems by universities (Beer, Clark, & Jones, 2010).…”