1. How authors did it - a methodological analysis of recent engineering education research papers in the European Journal of Engineering Education.
- Author
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Malmi, Lauri, Adawi, Tom, Curmi, Ronald, de Graaff, Erik, Duffy, Gavin, Kautz, Christian, Kinnunen, Päivi, and Williams, Bill
- Subjects
ENGINEERING education ,EDUCATION research ,SCHOLARLY publishing ,RESEARCH methodology ,TAXONOMY ,ADULTS ,HIGHER education - Abstract
We investigated 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 inEJEE in 2009, 2010 and 2013, classifying the papers using a taxonomy of research processes in engineering education research (EER) (Malmi et al. 2012). The majority of the papers presented either empirical work (59%) or were case reports (27%). Our main findings are as follows: (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; and (3) there are significant shortcomings in reporting research questions, methodology and limitations of studies. Our findings are consistent with and extend analyses ofEER papers in other publishing venues; they help to build a clearer picture of the research currently published inEJEE and allow us to make recommendations for consideration by the editorial team of the journal. Our employed procedure also provides a framework that can be applied to monitor future global evolution of this and otherEER journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]- Published
- 2018
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