Engineering education research (EER) draws on a wide range of philosophical traditions, yet the ontological, epistemological, and axiological (OEA) commitments that shape how knowledge is produced are rarely made explicit in published work. This study investigated the prevalence and nature of OEA positioning across a purposive sample of 54 papers published in 2024 in three Q1 engineering education journals: the Journal of Engineering Education, the European Journal of Engineering Education, and the Australasian Journal of Engineering Education. Using critical realism as a metatheoretical framework, we developed an OEA coding instrument and applied it through an AI-assisted abductive coding process, assigning ontological, epistemological, and two-level axiological codes to each paper and assessing their internal coherence. The overwhelming majority of papers carry implicit rather than declared OEA commitments, a pattern consistent across journals and methodologies. The field is genuinely philosophically plural, with ontological positions ranging from naïve realism to social constructionism and critical realism, but the lack of clarity in this space potentially has consequences for knowledge transfer to practice, cumulative knowledge-building, and the coherence of individual studies.

Sustainable Development (SD), while recognised globally as a major priority for engineering education, to date has seen mixed and overall limited implementation into engineering education curricula. Using a comparison of institutions in two substantially different national contexts, this study investigated the external, internal (institutional) and individual influences on instructors' decision-making, in relation to the incorporation of SD into the courses they teach. Drawing on interviews with 5-7 engineering instructors and 2-3 key informants at each site, supplemented by documentary evidence, the research showed that in the Danish institution studied, the national and institutional contexts exerted strong influences on instructors' decisions, with SD enshrined in government policies, and explicitly aligned with the institutional mission and commitment to PBL. By contrast, in the US institution, the national and institutional contexts exerted a weaker and sometimes counter influence, and individual commitment emerged as a strong determinant of instructors' decisions.

There is limited contemporary evidence around students' experience of lectures, notwithstanding critiques of their value. This study focuses on second-year chemical engineering students across four institutions in England and South Africa. The analysis of student interviews identified three themes describing what students value in lectures. In terms of interaction, they valued simply being able to ask questions. In terms of explanations, pacing was key and working through problems by hand was valued, while the use of powerpoint often received critique. The final theme shows how resources form a crucial link from the lecture into students' private studying. This study also drew on lecturer interviews, and the comparison shows considerable coherence between lecturer intentions and students' experiences. The final aspect of this study compared across institutions, and here we see the structural impact of the high levels of contact time in the South African programmes.

Widening access and participation feature prominently in higher education policy globally, and there are now significant academic communities engaged with implementing and interrogating initiatives aimed towards these goals. Despite an apparent global homogeneity in the use of this terminology, this study explores whether differing structural arrangements for higher education in different contexts might lead to subtly different meanings for the same terms. To investigate this question, this article analyses the discourses on expanding access to higher education in the Anglo-American world, focusing on the USA and the UK. While both countries have been at the forefront of higher education research on widening access, they exhibit starkly different systems concerning their structures, governance, and levels of youth participation. Using a discourse analysis of an exemplar academic text from each context, the article identifies key differences in how widening access to higher education is conceptualized across these two settings. Two structural features that are shown to significantly influence the discourses on widening access are the centralized admissions system in the UK (compared to the USA), and the theoretically open ‘system’ of access in the USA by virtue of the non-selective community college sector.

Project-Based Learning (PjBL) is an approach to designing curricula through inductive learning methods and typically utilizes active learning pedagogies.This study investigates the experiences of students and faculty at a new engineering school in China that had adopted the PjBL approach and created a new assessment system, which it terms the Comprehensive Ability Assessment Radar Map.This assessment system focuses on students' weekly reflective submissions during the project and involves instructors' evaluation of students' knowledge and motivation, communication, practical skills, thinking skills, responsibility, and project execution.This paper reports a qualitative interview-based case study investigating student and faculty perceptions of the new assessment system.We interviewed ten students (out of a class of 33) and six faculty (all PjBL instructors) about their perceptions of the assessment system.The analysis of the student interviews showed their concerns about the turnaround time of weekly assessments and the quality and objectivity of the feedback.The study of the faculty interviews captured the debate about the weighting of the items in the assessment system.However, it also supported the model that progressively de-emphasizes knowledge acquisition compared to professional skills.Concerning the assessment itself, faculty were divided on whether objective or subjective evaluations are desirable and on the feedback interval.

BackgroundEngineering culture research to date has described the culture as rigid, chilly, and posing many barriers to entry. However, the COVID-19 pandemic provided an important opportunity to explore how engineering culture responds to a major disruption.PurposeThe purposes of this study are to understand how elements of engineering culture emerged in mechanical engineering students' perceptions of their classroom experiences during the pandemic and how their experiences varied across two national contexts.MethodThis qualitative comparative case study examines undergraduate mechanical engineering students' perceptions of their experiences taking courses during the pandemic at two universities-one in the United States and one in South Africa. Semistructured interviews were conducted across both sites with 21 students and contextualized with 3 faculty member interviews. Student interviews were analyzed using an iterative process of deductive coding, inductive coding, and pattern coding.ResultsWe identified two key themes that characterized participants' experiences during the pandemic: hardness and access to resources. We found that students at both sites experienced two types of hardness-intrinsic and constructed-and were more critical of constructed forms of hardness. We found that the South African university's response to facilitating student access to resources was viewed by students as more effective when compared with the US university.ConclusionsWe found that hardness remained a central feature of engineering culture, based on student perceptions, and found that students expressed awareness of resource-related differences. A key distinction emerged between intrinsic and constructed hardness.

Contribution: This study explores industry members’ perceptions about the ABET-based accreditation in a developing country, using the case study of a program in a publicly funded polytechnic university in Ecuador. Background: Engineering programs often seek international accreditations to enhance the education quality, align with the global standards or gain academic reputation. ABET-based accreditation originates in United States, and thus presents some challenges for institutions in developing countries. Intended Outcomes: This study aimed to investigate the significance of international academic accreditation, as seen through the perspective of industry members. It focused on identifying fundamental competencies valued by employers and aimed to provide insights for institutions in similar contexts. Application Design: The research employed an approach informed by a qualitative methodology, involving in-depth interviews with five industry members who had served on the advisory committee board of an engineering program from a higher education institution in Ecuador. Findings: The findings identified three main areas of competencies that the industry members value: communication skills for teamwork, a problem-solving orientation, and an ability for effective task planning. The study also showed that these industry members value international accreditation as a means for enhancing education quality and ensuring graduates develop the necessary skills and competencies, yet the overall awareness with their peers remains relatively low.

This paper reports on a project funded through the Engineering Education and Centers (EEC) Division of the National Science Foundation. The project is aimed towards building understanding in the engineering education research (EER) community about the potential value of secondary data analysis (SDA) as well as developing guidelines for using this research approach. Changing the paradigm of single-use data collection will require actionable, proven practices for effective, ethical data sharing, coupled with sufficient incentives to both share and use existing data. To that end, this project drew together a team of experts and emerging researchers to develop a shared understanding of SDA, and to conduct two intentional projects using this approach. Significant insights from this work included (i.) deeper insights about the ethical implications of SDA as well specific approaches to address these; (ii.) the need for collaborative relationships between those who collected the data and those who are conducting the SDA; and (iii) the value of ongoing reflective practice by the entire team. We also solicited views from a larger workshop group at the NSF EEC Grantees conference in 2022 which surfaced ongoing concerns expressed by those who are new to this approach and confirmed the need for the engagements with the broader community that have been central to this project.

We advocate for SDA because the advantages of shared approaches to leveraging existing datasets can include (1) reduced time to publication (particularly for graduate students), (2) reduced load on participants (particularly those from populations marginalized in engineering, who may receive numerous requests to participate in research studies), (3) maximized use of data collected with public funds, and (4) greater equity in the field through data transparency.In spite of these advantages, challenging questions remain-most notably, how to legally and ethically conduct SDA without sacrificing quality or harming participants, and how to conduct robust high-quality analyses when data were collected for another purpose.Although challenges remain, we argue that it is possible to make advances on these questions.Thus, here we offer practical guidance for engineering education researchers conducting SDA, as well as address some frequently asked questions about SDA that can arise.

The impact of the time-pressured and demanding engineering curriculum has been shown in many studies to impact negatively on student success in engineering. To understand this phenomenon more closely, as well as to explore how different institutional and curricular contexts might offer different possibilities for students, this study draws on semistructured interviews with 51 second year chemical engineering students at five institutions across three national contexts. The article reports findings on the interplay between the structures that both constrain and enable learning (especially via curriculum and assessment). We show that an important personal transformation for students across all contexts involves learning how to "cope"with the stringent structural requirements of their curricula. Additionally, we highlight how students across three national contexts describe their ability to cope or not with curriculum related demands. Our findings show that these demands vary by context in relation to how much scheduled class times students have, how students structure their weeks around pending deadlines and other assessments and as well as how students transition between coping and not coping based on the prior academic years' experience. Our study allows useful conclusions to be drawn about the influence of different curricular structures, and how best to support student engagement with demanding curricular and assessment structures. We show that learning to cope is not a passive process but involves active engagement of students with the curriculum. Further, we suggest implications for educators who are interested in supporting students successfully progress from one academic level to another.

Teamwork is a critical learning outcome for engineering graduates. Due to the increasingly globalised nature of the engineering workforce and engineering education, more work is needed to integrate cross-cultural perspectives into the study of teamwork in engineering education research. With the largest engineering student population in the world, China represents a particularly important case. This study involved an exploratory, systematic literature review on how effective teamwork has been conceptualised among Chinese engineering educators. Chinese journal articles were sourced from the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) website. The analysis identified five themes regarding the conceptualisation of teamwork among Chinese engineering educators, namely, principles for formulating teams, the collective sense of honour, clarification of individuals' strengths, a comprehensive understanding of diverse team roles, and the integration of cooperation and competition.

The US National Academy of Engineering reports The Engineer of 2020 and Educating the Engineer of 2020 marked an important shift in policy thinking regarding engineering education: the emphasis of engineering education leaders thence shifted from producing engineers based on existing socioeconomic demands to actively envisioning and shaping the roles and characteristics of engineers in the future. Writing in the year of 2020, when engineering education yet again faces looming paradigm shift driven in part by a global pandemic and major powers' adjustment in attitudes and strategies to globalization, we attempt to reassess visions of "engineers for the future," as reflected through policy discourses in the United States and China, two major players in global engineering education. For this purpose, we present a careful reading of recent policy documents published by the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Chinese Ministry of Education (MoE). The NAE (2018) report Understanding the Educational and Career Pathways of Engineers resulted from a study commissioned by the Academy to "understand characteristics and career choices of engineering graduates, … as well as the characteristics of those with non-engineering degrees who are employed as engineers in the United States." Authors of the report sought to sustain the supply of competent engineers in the US by investigating "the engineering education-to-workforce pathway." Around the same time that the NAE study was conducted, engineering educators and policy makers in China were engaged in a series of conversations aimed at renewing China's engineering education for the next thirty years. These conversations laid the groundwork for the Emerging Engineering Education (3E) initiative, announced officially by the MoE in 2017 and followed by waves of funded engineering education research and practice projects across the nation. This paper examines and compares the visions of "engineers for the future" embodied in the NAE (2018) report and the 3E initiative (2017) in China. Our analysis of policy texts seeks to answer the following questions: What assessment of engineering education reality in the US and in China respectively motivated the NAE study and the 3E initiative? What visions of engineers and engineering education are advanced in the respective policy documents? Accordingly, what changes in engineering education are recommended for meeting the visions proposed by policy scholars in the US and China? Answering these questions will help us engage critically in discourses about the future of engineers and engineering education from a transnational perspective. Perhaps through conversations involving the global community of engineering educators, we might aspire to a broader and more inclusive vision of global engineering education than NAE and MoE has each aspired to accomplish in its own national context.

ABSTRACT This paper proposes the use of collaborative secondary data analysis (SDA) as a tool for building capacity in engineering education research. We first characterise the value of collaborative SDA as a tool to help emerging researchers develop skills in qualitative data analysis. We then describe an ongoing collaboration that involves a series of workshops as well as two pilot projects that seek to develop and test frameworks and practices for SDA in engineering education research. We identify emerging benefits and practical challenges associated with implementing SDA as a capacity building tool, and conclude with a discussion of future work.

Background: Traditional manual coding in qualitative data analysis can be labor-intensive and time-consuming, especially with large data sets. This research investigates the potential use of natural language processing (NLP) techniques and large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-3.5, to enhance efficiency and depth of insights during the qualitative data coding process.Method: We compared traditional manual thematic analysis with two NLP-assisted approaches, NLP Cluster Assisted (NLPCA) and NLP with GPT-3.5 (NLPGPT), using a dataset of 3,800 student responses on “exam wrappers” from an engineering physics course. Exam wrappers are structured reflection activities that prompt students to practice self-reflection after they get their graded exams back. Agreement between the methods was evaluated based on the similarity of the generated codes.Results: Both NLPCA and NLPGPT effectively identified similar themes in the student responses, demonstrating a promising alternative to traditional qualitative coding. Notably, the GPT-3.5 model exhibited strength in producing highly granular codes, which could offer deeper and more nuanced insights.Discussion: The results of the study underscore the significant benefits of integrating NLP and LLMs into qualitative research. While the study identified challenges such as biases in language models, overfitting in terms of overly granular codes, and resource constraints, the findings suggest these hurdles can be addressed with further research and refinement of the methodology. The application of NLP and LLMs across various research contexts needs validation, setting a promising direction for future studies. This research marks an important stepping stone in enhancing traditional qualitative research with AI technology, paving the way for more scalable, robust, and efficient research methodologies.

Academic Development Programmes (ADPs), or Extended Curriculum Programmes (ECPs), continue to play a central role in increasing access to previously marginalised students in higher education in South Africa. Using Archer's morphogenetic approach, this study examines how a group of ADP students "made their way" through their engineering undergraduate studies. Twelve students in their fourth year of study were interviewed three times and selected university documents were analysed. The authors found that the fragmented curriculum, shortened consolidation and examination periods, and unfavourable examination timetables potentially constrained the students' aspirations. In addition, the mainstream students and lecturers' ideas about ADP students worsened their experience of marginalisation and exception. We also found that students experienced the mainly black student enrolment of the ADP as racial discrimination. The findings indicate that students found themselves in enormously constrained circumstances, but they also exhibited what Archer calls "corporate agency" and different "modes of reflexivity" to overcome some of these constraints. We argue that the establishment of Academic Development Programmes as separate from mainstream curricula, while enabling access to some extent, may have unintended consequences of also constraining the students for whom they are designed.

In this innovative practice, work in progress paper, we examined the degree of constructive alignment in a pilot course informed by service-learning. Constructive Alignment refers to the degree of alignment between an instructor’s intentions and students’ experiences of a course. Data for the study were derived from a narrative constructed from the instructor’s reflections, describing intentions and experiences, coupled with thematic analysis of a transcript of a class discussion in which students were prompted to express their expectations for the course and their experiences of it. The instructor’s intentions were to take students through the experience of doing a real-world engineering project with community impact. Students had signed up for this course with expectations reasonably aligned with this plan. What they did not expect was how open-ended the engineering process would be, how it would demand intrinsic motivation for them rather than focusing on grades, and the degree to which the process would rest on communication skills, with substantial in-class discussion.