Abstract
This chapter describes several aspects of engineering education research with an emphasis on how they might relate to computing education research. We briefly summarize the history of engineering education as a scholarly field, and we describe the current structures that support engineering education research: academic departments, scholarly journals, annual conferences, and professional societies. We identify the theories that often inform engineering education research studies, including theories of cognition, motivation, and identity. We explain how quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods have been used. We summarize the results of an illustrative selection of empirical studies across a broad range of topics, including instructional methods, student development, faculty teaching practices, diversity, and assessment. Finally, we outline some similarities and differences between computing education research and engineering education research. Engineering education research has a longer history of research in professional development and assessment but an arguably shorter history in pre-college education and less international integration than computing education research.
Keywords
ABET, assessment, cognition, design, discipline-based education research (DBER), diversity, engineering, epistemology, identity, motivation
Date of this Version
4-1-2018
DOI
10.1017/9781108654555.012
Published in:
Published as Loui, M. C., & Borrego, M. (2019). Engineering education research. In S. A. Fincher & A. V. Robins, eds., The Cambridge Handbook of Computing Education Research. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 292–321.
Link to original published article:
http://doi.org/10.1017/9781108654555.012
Comments
This document is a pre-publication draft of: Loui, M. C., & Borrego, M. (2019) Engineering education research. In S. A. Fincher & A. V. Robins (Eds.) The Cambridge Handbook of Computing Education Research. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, [p-p] The published version has been further edited, please obtain and cite the published version from: http://www.cambridge.org/9781108721899 https://www.amazon.com/s?k=cambridge+handbook+computing+education This draft has been made available with permission, under the Cambridge University Press Green Open Access policy: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/open-access-policies/introduction-to-open-access