Our new special focus journal is out!
This is a major part of my Marie Curie fellowship, because I wanted (a) to learn more about publishing and (b) build the knowledge base regarding “student development” in engineering.
I’m particularly interested in identity development and epistemic cognition (how students think about knowing and what knowledge is). I am myself working on a major research project exploring these epistemic topics, but with this journal issue I helped provide other people who are working on similar topics a place to publish their work.
It’s a really nice set of papers–three on identity and five on epistemology, with an introductory statement up front which I wrote with the people I brought on board as guest editors. The editorial team spent the past 18 months on this project–getting authors invited, articles competatively selected then carefully reviewed and enhanced.
You may remember that we issued a call for papers about 18 months ago. We managed to keep the whole project on track schedule-wise and the final printed version came out in August 2019, a full four months before I’d promised the funders I’d deliver it!!!!! How often will I get to say something like that!? Delighted to have the chance now.
Guest Editorial Special Issue on Using Enquiry- and Design-Based Learning to Spur Epistemological and Identity Development of Engineering Students
Next are the three papers on identity. These all deal with development of professional identity among engineering students:
Design Experiences, Engineering Identity, and Belongingness in Early Career Electrical and Computer Engineering Students
Factors Influencing Engineering Identity Development of Latinx Students
Prediction of Engineering Identity in Engineering Graduate Students
And finally, the five papers on epistemic cognition of engineering students:
Engineering Students’ Epistemological Thinking in the Context of Project-Based Learning
Introductory Engineering Decision-Making: Guiding First-Year Students to Relativism in Software Design
Practical Epistemic Cognition in a Design Project—Engineering Students Developing Epistemic Fluency
Teacher Learner, Learner Teacher: Parallels and Dissonance in an Interdisciplinary Design Education Minor
Here’s an official overview of the issue:
“This Special Issue of the IEEE Transactions on Education focuses on using enquiry-based design projects to spur engineering students’ development, so as to increase understanding and application of the relevant theories, foster higher rates of student development and achieve this in healthy and productive ways.
Each of the eight papers in this Special Issue focuses on a specific aspect, presenting an empirical research study on either epistemological or identity development among engineering students. Five of the papers are on epistemological development or ‘epistemic cognition,’ and three on identity development. The overall set of resources is presented so engineering educators can gain familiarity with existing theories on how students change and grow over their university years, and can consider the findings of empirical studies and what these might imply for their own teaching and for their students’ learning.”
If you’ve got a manuscript you’d like to publish with this journal, you can find links on the website of the IEEE Education Society, http://ieee-edusociety.org/about/ieee-transactions-education. Or, feel free to drop me a line at <irelandbychance dot com> to ask advice–I’m an Associate Editor of this journal.
Ireland by Chance 