Engineering education research

Engineering education research (EER) is the field of inquiry that creates knowledge which aims to define, inform, and improve both Engineering Education and the education of engineers. It achieves this through research on topics such as: epistemology, policy, assessment, pedagogy, diversity, amongst others, as they pertain to engineering.

Engineering Education Research gained visibility during the 1980s, although the formal education of engineers in the United States traces back to as early as 1802, with the establishment of the United States Military Academy at West Point for the purpose of training the U.S. Army's corps of engineers. The Rensselaer School (now Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) was founded in 1824 and conferred degrees in civil engineering upon four students in 1835.

Spurred by concerns of national competitiveness and the insufficient number of graduating engineers the Neal Report called for research to improve teaching and learning in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields.

Similar to other disciplines, the 1990s brought a focus on the scholarship of teaching as demonstrated by the 1995 NRC Report, "Engineering education: Designing an adaptive system", influenced by Ernst Boyer. This focus was primarily motivated by the need to improve the quality of engineers produced by universities in the US. Additionally, 1993 marked the relaunch of the Journal of Engineering Education, which served as a clearinghouse for scholarly research.

As concerns regarding globalization and the need for innovation increased during the late 1990s and 2000s, engineering education research was influenced by calls of reform to produce the quantity and diversity of engineers needed to address global problems.

Continuing the development of the field, centers for Engineering Education Research emerged in the early 2000s. The NAE formed a Committee on Engineering Education (CEE) in 1999, NAE’s Center for the Advancement of Scholarship on Engineering Education (CASEE) was established in 2002 and the Center for the Advancement of Engineering in 2003.

During the mid-2000s, dedicated funding, specialized publications, centers for research, academic preparation and conferences which connected the distributed community supplied the infrastructure necessary for the burgeoning field of research.

Influential Reports on the History of Engineering Education

The 2006 Report of the Steering Committee of the National Engineering Education Research Colloquies outlined the 5 key topic areas of engineering education research as follows:

According to Borrego and Bernhard, international collaborations are developing in an effort to create global competencies in engineering students. Engineering global competency is the possession of "the knowledge, ability, and predisposition to work effectively with people who define and solve problems differently than they do." Educational programs that emphasize global engineering competencies research the development and assessment of global competency within the engineering practice.

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