Development of a taxonomy of keywords for engineering education research

Abstract

The diversity of engineering education research provides an opportunity for cross-fertilisation of ideas and creativity, but it also can result in fragmentation of the field and duplication of effort. One solution is to establish a standardised taxonomy of engineering education terms to map the field and communicate and connect research initiatives. This report describes the process for developing such a taxonomy, the EER Taxonomy. Although the taxonomy focuses on engineering education research in the United States, inclusive efforts have engaged 266 individuals from 149 cities in 30 countries during one multiday workshop, 7 conference sessions, and several other virtual and in-person activities. The resulting taxonomy comprises 455 terms arranged in 14 branches and 6 levels. This taxonomy was found to satisfy four criteria for validity and reliability: (1) keywords assigned to a set of abstracts were reproducible by multiple researchers, (2) the taxonomy comprised terms that could be selected as keywords to fully describe 243 articles in 3 journals, (3) the keywords for those 243 articles were evenly distributed across the branches of the taxonomy, and (4) the authors of 31 conference papers agreed with 90% of researcher-assigned keywords. This report also describes guidelines developed to help authors consistently assign keywords for their articles by encouraging them to choose terms from three categories: (1) context/focus/topic, (2) purpose/target/motivation, and (3) research approach.

Keywords:

• educational level
• educational setting
• outcomes
• research approaches
• theoretical frameworks

Acknowledgements

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. The authors wish thank members of the advisory board (listed in Table 3) for offering guidance throughout the project, Marjorie Hlava and her Access Innovations colleagues for providing good insight as we refined the taxonomy, Samuel Scott for creating the iPhone app, Charlotte Sawyer for assisting with validating the taxonomy, and Robyn Rosenberg for helping identify relevant literature.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

About the authors

Cynthia J. Finelli is Associate Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department and Faculty Director for Engineering Education Research in the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching in Engineering at University of Michigan.

Maura Borrego is Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin.

Golnoosh Rasoulifar served as postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching in Engineering at University of Michigan.

Notes

1. The majority of text in this section is reprinted with permission, © 2014 American Society for Engineering Education (Finelli and Borrego 2014). This report differs from the conference papers cited within it, because it includes a complete description of all sessions as well as an expanded literature review and comprehensive analysis in the discussion and conclusion.

Additional information

Funding

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under EEC grant number 1240797.