Methodological Analysis of Engineering Education Research Publications

We are investigating research processes applied in recent publications in the European Journal of Engineering Education (EJEE) exploring how papers link to

theoretical work and how research processes have been designed and reported. We analysed all 155 papers published in EJEE in 2009, 2010 and 2013,

classifying the papers using a taxonomy of research processes in engineering education research (EER) (Malmi et al. 2012). Our main findings are: 1) EJEE

papers build moderately on a wide selection of theoretical work; 2) a great majority of papers have a clear research strategy but data analysis methods are

mostly simple descriptive statistics or simple/undocumented qualitative research methods; 3) there are significant shortcomings in reporting research questions,

methodology and limitations of studies. Papers including empirical work form a great majority of papers, splitting into two considerably different categories. Our

findings are consistent with recent similar analyses of EER papers.

Keywords: Engineering Education Research; Taxonomy; Research methods 

Publikationen

• Malmi, L and de Graaff, Erik and Adawi, T and Curmi, R and Duffy, G and Kautz, C and Kinnunen, P and Williams, B: Developing a Methodological Taxonomy of EER papers Proceedings of the 40th annual SEFI conference. Thessaloniki, Greece, 2012.
• Malmi, L and Adawi, T and Curmi, R and De Graaff, E and Duffy, G and Kautz, C and Kinnunen, P and Williams, B: Methodological Analysis of SEFI EER papers Proceedings of the 41st SEFI Conference. Leuven, Belgien., 2013.