Discovery of Research Trends in Computer Science Education on Ethics Using Topic Modeling

To evaluate how ethics is addressed in computer science education, unsupervised text mining was performed to identify six salient topics and their trends in educational research publications. The majority of articles focused on the integration of ethics into introductory computer science courses, in particular those targeting non-majors. Models derived from a larger data set of research abstracts on ethics in computing, revealed additional topics in human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence, currently underrepresented in computer science education research. The agreement between automatic and manual topic assignments was 89%. Therefore, our approach provides a time-efficient and reproducible evaluation system to support curricular decision-making.