Early Childhood Research Landscape on Children’s Profile: Coherent Taxonomy, Motivation, Open Challenges, Recommendations and, Pathways for Future Research

To survey researchers’ efforts in depth in learning new problems, issues, motives on research related to children’s profiles; sculpting the literature into a clear and structed taxonomy; and determining the basic attributes of this research in terms of motivation and challenges, as well as recommendations and future studies. A focused search for each article was conducted on child profiles in four major databases: ScienceDirect, Web of Science, EBSCO, and ERIC. These databases are broad and sufficient to cover child profile studies in the literature. The initial query search resulted in 99 articles: (15/99) from ScienceDirect database, (45/99) from WoS, (23/99) from ERIC, and (16/99) articles from EBSCO, from 2011 to 2016. Those papers were thoroughly perused for the main purpose of developing a general map for research conducted on this emerging topic. Most of the articles (81.82%; 81/99) were measurement and evaluation papers; (15.15%; 15/99) were review and survey papers that refer to the literature in order to describe the child profile; and (3.03%; 3/99) were a design. Since 2011, researchers have followed the trend of child profile applications in many ways, while leaving certain aspects for further attention. Regardless of their categorization, articles focus on several challenges that hinder the full utility of child profile apps and do recommend mitigations. Research on child profiles is active and highly varied. In this paper, we hope that this review of previous studies will contribute to understanding the challenges and gaps that are available to other researchers to join this research line.