This article clarifies key concepts that undergird qualitative research, which is being used increasingly as engineering educators improve classrooms, programs, and institutions. The paper compares quantitative and qualitative research, describes some qualitative data collection strategies used in engineering education, addresses methods for establishing trustworthiness, and discusses strategies for analyzing qualitative data. Also included are illustrative examples of recent engineering education research that features qualitative data analysis and mixed‐method (quantitative and qualitative) approaches.

This paper reports data on how well one engineering curriculum with extensive experiential components helps students mature toward more complex thinking; toward being better able to make good decisions on ambiguous, real-world, engineering problems. Hour-long, structured interviews were used to assess students' thinking based on William Perry's Model of Intellectual Development. These cross-sectional data show Colorado School of Mines students progressing an average of 1.0 Positions during their undergraduate years. This may be an unusually high achievement. If so, the data speak to the value of experiential education in a curriculum. However, the data are disturbing in that only one quarter of graduating seniors show progression to the level needed in their professions (above Position 5), while one third of them still fall below Position 4. We argue that, to get more students to progress above Position 5, professors teaching experiential engineering courses need to be knowledgeable about developmental models like Perry's and need to use those insights proactively in mentoring their students.

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During the last four years, we have been experimenting with different laboratory formats for use with the general chemistry course for science majors at the University of Oklahoma. Our chief reason for developing these materials has been our feeling that the educational value of traditional laboratory formats is too limited to justify the money and student time invested in them. This paper reports our work with a laboratory format called guided/open-ended inquiry. Our evaluation of this format indicates that it is superior to traditional (verification) laboratories in several important respects. GoalsIt was decided that the laboratory program should attempt to accomplish the following goals: (1) acquaint the student with fundamental laboratory techniques and procedures. This goal is a traditional one which any laboratory which serves science majors needs to meet. ( 2) give the student experience with aspects of scientific inquiry. By this we mean having the student experience such activities as: identifying a problem to study, designing experiments, and analyzing and explaining data. Finally, the laboratory should be designed to (3) enhance the student's thinking ability toward more abstract thinking processes. This goal can be best clarified by using the intellectual developmental theory of Jean Piaget. Piaget's theory and its application to educational settings is discussed in several references (1-6).