This engineering education research project will enable two workshops with the purpose of bringing together experts in engineering education research and taxonomists to understand how to identify and classify research in engineering education. The goal of the workshops will be to understand the spectrum of engineering education research and allow emerging areas to gain recognition.
The broader significance and importance of this project will be to help understand the diversity of research investments in engineering education, identify areas that are emerging, and help current researchers better frame their projects using a common ontology. The project will also help ongoing efforts to evaluate STEM education portfolios. This project overlaps with NSF's strategic goals of transforming the frontiers by making investments that lead to emerging new fields of engineering, or shifting existing fields. Additionally NSF's goal of innovating for society is enabled by creating results and research that are useful for society by informing educational policy and practices.
Engineering education research is a new interdisciplinary field that has recently emerged to improve the learning and retention of students in engineering programs. Researchers in this field, including many funded by NSF, work to better understand the unique challenges faced by engineering students and the role professors and others can have in helping overcome those challenges. The research areas have grown substantially, and the field needs to be better organized so that engineering professors, students, parents, and other researchers can more easily search it. Being better organized will help new research build on the findings of previous studies and will help people working with engineering students to use the most up-to-date knowledge. This project allowed us to develop a list of common keywords (a taxonomy) that can be applied to engineering education research projects to organize the field. Our process involved many engineering education researchers from the United States and from other countries who helped develop and refine the list of keywords. First, we asked other researchers already working on similar projects to share their lists of potential keywords. Then, we hosted a two-day workshop and several conference sessions for attendees to suggest refinements to the list. We asked participants to use the list to assign keywords to recently published work and then to offer suggestions for improvement. Finally, we tested the list of keywords by using it for a large set of recent articles to ensure that no new keywords were needed and that keywords were being used with approximately the same frequency. We checked our keywords with the authors of the papers, and their agreement further demonstrates the validity of the final product. During our project, we worked with the editors of four different engineering education research journals to ensure that the list of keywords would be used when authors submit their work in the future. The list will also help researchers conduct literature searches and situate their own work within the broader field, and it will help funding agencies (like NSF) organize their funded research projects.
