Global Research Trends on Productive Struggle Students in Primary Scholl: Bibliometric Analysis (2016-2025) using VOSviewer

This study focusses on trends in existing research and creates a bibliometric map of articles discussing the productive struggle of elementary school students using the VOSviewer application from a psychological perspective. It also examines the influence of productive struggle on the quality of elementary school students' mathematics learning. Data collection was conducted using reference management software, specifically Publish or Perish, to facilitate a literature review focused on the topic of productive struggle. This approach provides insights into the scope and depth of existing studies, highlighting patterns and gaps for further investigation. The keywords "elementary school students" and "productive struggle" were used throughout the data collection process. For the analysis, 175 articles published between 2016 and 2025 were selected. The results show that research on productive struggle has become a global trend from 2016 to 2018. However, from 2019 there was a decline, this trend increased again from 2020 to 2022. However, in 2023 there was a drastic decline to only 11 publications. The peak of research on productive struggle occurred in 2024 with 30 publications, and then it declined again in 2025 with only 7 publications. Based on the results of the bibliometric analysis, the term productive struggle has 143 links. It can be concluded that research publications on productive struggle are still limited to research and have great potential for further studies on students' productive struggle from a psychological perspective in the future, especially on emotional intelligence, motivation, learning, and anxiety in mathematics learning.