International Engineering Education Journals: Past, Present and Potential Research Directions

Abstract

International Engineering Education Journals Past, Present and Potential Research Directions This manuscript summarizes the evolution of research topics in three well-known international engineering educational journals and offer a condense recollection of research topics for future scientific investigations. The three selected journals were the European Journal of Engineering Education spanning from 1978-2012, the International Journal of Electrical Engineering Education spanning from 1969-2012, and the International Journal of Mechanical Engineering Education spanning from 1983-2012. In order to eliminate the potential common method bias associated with only one text mining techniques, for each of these journals two text mining techniques were applied in five years segments by extracting 6 and 10 topics from the corpus of documents associated with each segment. Latent Semantic Analysis and Latent Dirichlet Allocation are two text mining techniques commonly used for topic extraction over large volumes (corpora) of text documents producing a summary of topics that describe the entire corpus of documents. These topics were then analyzed to determine how the overall engineering education and the engineering education in appropriate fields (mechanical engineering and electrical engineering) evolved over a period spanning approximately three decades. The results indicate that both text data mining techniques mostly concur that over time, the overall engineering education has evolved from design skills, teaching in a technical field, course project development to industrial computer systems, systems engineering knowledge, simulation, expert systems, to quality management, online distance learning, assessment, copyright issues, and sustainable technology. Some overlap of topics is observed in the analyzed segments. In the electrical engineering field journals, the trend from analog to digital education is observed. In the mechanical engineering journal, many topics remain consistent over time but trend toward incorporating the latest software and technology is observed. Overall, the analysis represent a map of research topics in the aforementioned journals with implications for the understanding of the past, present and future research direction in the engineering education field.