The cover design for EJEE

Our 12-member governing board of the Research in Engineering Education Network (REEN) aims to increase the quality and visibility of engineering education research globally. We do this by:

• Organizing the Research in Engineering Education Symposium (REES) that is held every other year to encourage dialogue, networking, idea-sharing, and skill-building among engineering educators. You can join us in Cape Town for REES 2019, July 10-12, 2019.
• Assisting local REES hosts in publishing the proceedings of the REES conferences.
• Organizing and publishing special focus journal issues showcasing research conducted for dissemination at REES that carries the research findings far beyond the confines of the REES meeting itself.

Today, REEN received good news from one of our Board members, Professor Jonte Bernhard from Linköping University’s Department of Science and Technology in Norrköping, Sweden. Jonte and I are the two European Representatives on REEN. Every continent (except Antarctica) is represented on our Board.

Jonte happily announced:

the EJEE special issue based on REES 2015 in Dublin is now finally published online (individual papers have been published earlier) as vol. 44, issue 1-2: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ceee20/44/1-2

This issue is on “Research methodologies that link theory and practice” which was the focus of the REES 2015 meeting in Dublin. You can read for free the EJEE Editorial for Special Issue: Research Methodologies that link theory and practice written by principal guest editor Anne Gardner with co-editors Jonte Bernhard, Sally Male, and Jennifer Turns. Your library may provide you with access to the paid articles. The list of articles is extensive.

Some have to do with design education (a favorite topic of mine!):

• A pedagogy of larger concerns used as a lens to reflect on the design of student learning experiences by Jim Borgford-Parnell, Jennifer Turns, Cynthia J. Atman, Ken Yasuhara, and Lauren Fryhle.
• Design science research – a powerful tool for improving methods in engineering education research by Anna-Karin Carstensen and Jonte Bernhard.
• Design-based research to broaden participation in pre-college engineering: research and practice of an interest-based engineering challenges framework by Avneet Hira and Morgan M. Hynes.
• The relationship between design reflectivity and conceptions of informed design among high school students by Molly H. Goldstein, Şenay Purzer, Robin S. Adams, Jie Chao, and Charles Xie.
• A qualitative investigation of design knowledge reuse in project-based mechanical design courses by Dónal P. Holland, Conor J. Walsh, and Gareth J. Bennett.
• Written feedback provided by first-year engineering students, undergraduate teaching assistants, and educators on design project work by Farshid Marbouti, John Mendoza-Garcia, Heidi A. Diefes-Dux, and Monica E. Cardella.

A major goal is to get engineering students to engage–especially in dealing with tough, complex, and wicked- or ill-structured problems, the way I observe architecture students do:

• Scaffolding strategies in a rubric-based intervention to promote engineering students’ ability to address wicked problems by Johanna Lönngren, Tom Adawi, and Magdalena Svanström.
• Action research: a methodology for transformative learning for a professor and his students in an engineering classroom by Jillian Seniuk Cicek, Sandra Ingram, Marcia Friesen, and Douglas Ruth.
• Integrating quantitative and qualitative research methods to examine student resistance to active learning by Prateek Shekhar, Michael Prince, Cynthia Finelli, Matt Demonbrun, and Cynthia Waters which already has 368 views.

One of the papers in this journal has to do with the benefits of getting students to write, something I’ve published on before:

• Investigating invisible writing practices in the engineering curriculum using practice architectures by Rosalie Goldsmith, Keith Willey, and David Boud.

Two articles deal with spatial perception, an area where the Dublin hosts of REES 2015 have developed expertise with the help of expert Professor Sherly Sorby:

• Longitudinal study of the impact of requiring training for students with initially weak spatial skills by Norma L. Veurink and Sheryl A. Sorby.
• Spatial cognition in engineering education: developing a spatial ability framework to support the translation of theory into practice by Jeffrey Buckley, Niall Seery, and Donal Canty.

Other articles in the issue include:

• Linking practice and theory using Engaged Scholarship by Judith K. Shawcross and Tom W. Ridgman, with 668 views to date.
• Enhancing the effectiveness of concept inventories using textual analysis: investigations in an electrical engineering subject by Andrea M. Goncher and Wageeh Boles.
• Hands-on engagement online: using a randomised control trial to estimate the impact of an at-home lab kit on student attitudes and achievement in a MOOC by Jennifer DeBoer, Casey Haney, S. Zahra Atiq, Casey Smith, and David Cox.
• Exploring student study behaviours in engineering: how undergraduates prepared textbook problems for online submission by Angela Minichiello, Sherry Marx, Laurie McNeill, and Christine Hailey.
• The use of clickers in Instrumentation and Control Engineering education: a case study by Asiya Khan, Priska Schoenborn, and Sanjay Sharma.

Congratulations to all the authors published in this journal. Well done and keep raising the bar for us all!