Taking Stock: An Analysis of the Publishing Record as Represented by the Journal of Engineering Education

Abstract

The Journal of Engineering Education emerged in the engineering education community in 1993 as a continuation of the American Society of Engineering Education's journal, Engineering Education. The Journal of Engineering Education was to play a role in the broadening of engineering education culture by helping to bring the scholarship of engineering education to the same level of respect and recognition in the faculty reward system as traditional scholarship in engineering sciences. In doing so, the journal hoped to keep pace with and encourage the significant changes in engineering education needed to prepare for the challenges of 21st century practice. This paper discusses the engineering education environment as reflected in six years of papers published in the Journal of Engineering Education from 1996 to 2001. Topics of papers are identified, along with changes and trends in these topics during the six-year period. In addition, characteristics of particularly convincing papers are enumerated and discussed. This paper is offered as a summary and review of this six-year body of work on engineering education and should aid the engineering education community in reflecting on the success of the Journal in promoting and encouraging the scholarship of teaching. I. INTRODUCTIONIn 2000, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching* embarked on an ambitious research effort to study preparation for the professions in four fields-law, engineering, the clergy and teacher preparation. These studies are collaborations with educators and practitioners in each profession with the aim to better understand and describe the state of professional education in each field. The Carnegie Foundation's ongoing study of engineering is entitled Taking Stock: A Look at Engineering Education at the Turn of the Century and Beyond. It aims to describe and analyze both typical and exemplary approaches to teaching and learning engineering at the outset of the new century. The views into the education of engineers that emerge from this work will complement other activities in the engineering community such as adoption of new ABET EC2000 standards for accreditation and the National Academy of Engineering's Study of the Engineer in 2020 [2].In the initial year of Taking Stock several "mini-studies" were undertaken in order to use published data to gain insights into engineering education at the national level. National Science Foundation reports [23,24] were reviewed and synthesized into the publications "Students Entering and Exiting the Engineering Pipeline-Identifying Key Decision Points and Trends" [13] and "Descriptions of Engineering: Student and Engineering Practitioner Perspectives" [35]. In addition, papers published in the last six years of the Journal of Engineering Education (henceforth referred to as the Journal) were reviewed; this current paper is a review and summary of these six years of publications in the Journal. This is not the first review of Journal publications since its introduction in 1993. In 1999 a ...

Gender in Engineering Education Research: A Content Analysis of Research inJEE, 1998-2012

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What Is the State of theArt of Systematic Reviewin Engineering Education?

“…First, there may be relevant systematic reviews that our search did not find, because of limitations in the search strings used (see Appendix A). Articles that did not have the word “review” in the title may have been missed; omissions include prior work analyzing JEE articles by Whitin and Sheppard () and Wankat (), which the authors themselves did not label as reviews. Another choice, requiring appearance of the word “engineering” in the article, led to some topics of interest to engineering education being missed.…”

Work in progress: Mesoscopic analysis of engineering education scholarship in electrical and Computer Engineering, 2002–2011

“…This study also included investigation of funding trends for research in engineering education. Whitin and Sheppard similarly analyzed papers (n=398) published in JEE from 1996 to 2001 to identify topical and research trends [6]. Osorio and Osorio, on the other hand, performed quantitative and qualitative analysis of papers in JEE (n=212) and European Journal of Engineering Education (EJEE) (n=119) from 1998 to 2000 to highlight subject coverage, authorship characteristics, most common topics and types of scholarship [7].…”

“…Osorio and Osorio, on the other hand, performed quantitative and qualitative analysis of papers in JEE (n=212) and European Journal of Engineering Education (EJEE) (n=119) from 1998 to 2000 to highlight subject coverage, authorship characteristics, most common topics and types of scholarship [7]. Osorio later compared results of prior studies by Wankat [5], Whitin and Sheppard [6], and Osorio and Osorio [7] to discuss prevailing subjects, author demographic data, article types, and citation data [8]. Jesiek et al [4] performed a similar analysis of more than 800 engineering education research papers published [2005][2006][2007][2008].…”