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

Journal of Engineering Education, Jan 2004 by Whitin, Katherine, Sheppard, Sheri

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. INTRODUCTION

In 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 (hence-forth 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 review paper was published in by Wankat entitled "An Analysis of the Articles in the Journal of Engineering Education" which looked at the 20 issues of the Journal between Volume 82, No. 1, January 1993 through Volume 86, No. 4, October 1997. Keyword counts were presented, along with data on the number of references cited per paper, and whether assessment and an educational theory supported the work. The author concluded that "the content of the Journal has become more professional and the quality has improved over the years" [40].

II. RESEARCH APPROACH

As part of the Taking Stock study on engineering education, a review of six years of the Journal of Engineering Education was undertaken. The goals of the review were:

(1) to create a bibliography for use in the study.

(2) to inform the study by answering:

* What topics and categories of topics has the engineering education community published on?

* What changes in topics have occurred over the years?

* What are the characteristics of particularly well-written papers?

This paper presents answers to the questions of the second goal. The first goal is not discussed further here.

The six-year period of the Journal of Engineering Education reviewed was from January 1996 through October 2001. Twenty-five issues were reviewed of which twenty-four were published under the leadership of John W. Prados. For the purposes of this study, "The Editor's Page" and "The Academic Bookshelf" sections were omitted. In total, 398 papers were reviewed.

Every paper was read in its entirety and coded into one of six categories. These categories were defined based on clustering of key words used by Wankat [40] in his 1999 review of the Journal and topics that the Journal lists on its Web site. The categories consist of the stakeholder groups in engineering education (Students, Faculty, and Practitioners and Alumni), the Courses and Programs these stakeholders are involved with, and Assessment and Evaluation of the stakeholders, courses and programs. In addition, there is a General category. Definitions of these categories are provided in Table 1. The set of categories in Table 1 is not unique; it was selected because the categories, collectively, cover all of the stakeholders and key aspects of an engineering education.