“Prediction” in Educational Research: a Bibliographic Mapping of Academic Production Over Time

The article presents a Systematic Literature Review that analyzes a specific bibliographic corpus from Web of Science: papers written in English about prediction published in the educational field from 1900 to 2019. Its objective is to conduct a preliminary analysis of the academic production considering not just its conceptual structure but also its scientific evolution. In doing so, text mining techniques on bibliographic material were used via SciMAT tool with the purpose of generating strategic, thematic, stability between periods, and evolution diagrams according to keywords indexed in the analyzed documents. The results obtained show the proliferation of studies and thematic diversification in the last 10 years, as well as the prevalent identification of predictors through inductive strategies, the predominance of investigations focused on the individual as the unit of analysis, the concern for student retention, and discussions around external validity when constructing and analyzing predictive models.