Analysis of the First Ten Years of the Journal
of Engineering Education
PHILLIP C. WANKAT
School of Chemical Engineering and
Division of Interdisciplinary Engineering Studies
Purdue University
ABSTRACT
The analysis of the Journal of Engineering Education (JEE) is
extended to the ten year period from 1993 through 2002. The
most common keywords remain teaching, computers and design
although “assessment” and “ABET” became popular from 1998
to 2002. The most cited reference and author are ABET
Criterion 2000 and Richard Felder, respectively. The median
number of JEE citations of articles published in JEE during 1993
and 1994 is one. The number of papers with financial support
increased by over 80 percent. NSF is the dominant source of
support. Comparing the second five-year period to the first five-
year period, there were increases in the percentages of papers
reporting data, doing assessment, and using educational or
learning theories. These results are consistent with a journal that
is becoming more research oriented.
I. INTRODUCTION
The Journal of Engineering Education (JEE) is the most impor-
tant venue for disseminating engineering education research in the
United States. We can learn a significant amount about the state of
engineering education and engineering education research by ana-
lyzing the contents of the journal. When the journal was reconfig-
ured in 1993, it was focused as a [2] “scholarly journal, seeking to
serve the needs of the engineering education enterprise.” The types
of articles published included [3], “1. Papers that show the present
and changing status of engineering education….Particularly wel-
come are papers that document the results of educational experi-
ments … . 2 … document what we can learn from our
history….3…describe the course of current trends as well as the fu-
ture….4…describe interdisciplinary efforts….5… describe out-
reach….” The first five years of JEE were analyzed previously [1].
In this paper the five years of JEE from 1998 through 2002 (21
issues) are analyzed in detail and are contrasted and compared with
the previous analysis [1]. Combining these two analyses allows us to
determine some of the trends in engineering education as reflected
in JEE during the last ten years. In addition to continuing the previ-
ous paper [1], which analyzed the content of articles, the authors,
and the citations, this paper analyzes the authors in considerably
more depth and looks at the sources of support for the research.
January 2004
The Editorial Review Board of JEE recently completed the de-
velopment of a revised and more focused mission that will make
JEE [4] “an archival record of scholarly research in engineering ed-
ucation.” In conjunction with this revised mission, new guidelines
and review criteria for papers were published in January 2003 [5].
These guidelines call for papers that are focused on research, have a
more scholarly content and have much more specific review re-
quirements than the earlier guidelines [3]. Essentially, the new mis-
sion and guidelines eliminate certain types of articles that were pre-
viously acceptable.
During the ten years from 1993 to 2002 JEE was a scholarly
publication that was not exclusively based on research. Thus, this
analysis can serve as a benchmark for later comparison to the more
research-based version of JEE established in January 2003. Some of
the shortcomings noted in this analysis have been addressed in the
new publication guidelines.
II. ANALYSIS OF ARTICLES AND THEIR CONTENT
Every article and educational brief, but not including editorials
and “The Academic Bookshelf,” was analyzed. Results were tabu-
lated by issue, by year, by five-year periods and by ten-year period.
The same categories that were used previously [1] were used. Since
they are defined in detail in [1], only additional explanatory remarks
are made here.
Keywords (Table 1), an important window to the content of arti-
cles, are not listed in JEE. At most four keywords per article were as-
signed based on the title, abstract, descriptions and the amount of
space dedicated to a topic. If possible, the keywords were chosen
from the keyword list developed during the previous analysis [1].
This procedure makes the keyword lists directly comparable. Obvi-
ously, choosing keywords requires an occasionally subjective judg-
ment of whether a topic is a major focus of the article. Often, the
choice was obvious. For example, if the title of a hypothetical article
was “Teaching Mechanics on the Internet,” the abstract talked about
teaching mechanics on the Internet, and this was the topic of the text
and data, the keywords would be teaching, mechanics, internet and
computers. If teaching is included in the article but it is not a focus of
the article, the article would be coded with a teaching method in
Table 2, but it would not have the keyword “teaching” in Table 1. I
assigned all the keywords. From a research viewpoint, a better proce-
dure would be to have a panel assign keywords for each article. How-
ever, since a panel was not used for the first five years [1], the use of a
panel in this study would reduce the value of comparisons between
the two sets of data. For this reason and logistical reasons, a panel
was not used in this study. Differences in the counts or percentages
for different keywords are believed not to be significant.
Journal of Engineering Education 13
 Table 1. Keyword count.
Table 2. Summary of tabulated data.
The top three keywords—teaching, computers, and design—
from 1998 to 2002 (Table 1) were the same as from 1993 to 1997
but with a change in the order of design and computers. On the
other hand, “assessment” moved up from a tie for 13th (last) to 4th,
and both internet/web (now 6th) and “ABET” (now 7th), did not
appear previously [1]. These changes certainly reflect the impact of
the assessment requirements of NSF funding and ABET’s Criteria
2000, and the increasing selectivity (research focus) of JEE. [Note:
Strictly speaking, the usage “ABET Criteria 2000” is incorrect [6];
14 Journal of Engineering Education
however, since this usage is common and understood I have contin-
ued to use it]. Other keywords with significant increases in percent-
age of papers listing that keyword are “groups/teams,” “distance
education,” “experiential/hands on,” “programming” and “entrepre-
neurship.” The first three of these are subcategories of teaching and
the fourth is a subcategory of computers. The increase in entrepre-
neurship was mainly due to the October 2001 special issue that in-
cluded papers from the NCIIA (National Collegiate Inventors and
Innovators Association) conference. The increases in papers with a
January 2004
major focus on computers (including the subcategory Internet/
Web) and distance education probably reflect the increased impor-
tance of technology in teaching. Other subcategories of computers
that had less than eight citations were CAI (6), multimedia (4), on-
line or virtual lab (3), simulators (3), calculational/ computational
(2), computer advising/e-mentoring (2), streaming video (2) and
web lectures (2). Many of these papers were also coded with the
keyword “teaching.” The increase in papers on “experiential/hands
on” is partially balanced by the decrease in papers on “laboratory.”
Keywords with significant decreases are “teaching,” “design,” and
two keywords which appeared previously but have been dropped,
“aeronautical engineering” (8th) and “Quality/TQM/CQI” (12th).
The decrease in papers with the keyword teaching may be due to
the way keywords were assigned and may not reflect a real trend.
Although many keywords only occurred a few times and are not
shown in Table 1, the analysis of keywords shows that the content
of JEE remains very broad.
Table 2 summarizes the tabulated data for the content of the
JEE articles. The summary data for the five years from 1993
through 1997 includes a minor correction in the journal count (the
total is 230 not 231 because 1998 had 54 not 55 articles [1]), which
also changes some of the percentages slightly. The journal went to a
different binding to allow more pages per issue in July 1998. This
increase in size is reflected by the increased number of articles
during the 1998–2002 period compared to 1993–1997 period. The
third column in Table 2 is based on a judgment of whether under-
standing of the article required discipline specific knowledge. In
1998 it became obvious in many of the articles that only the figures
required discipline specific knowledge for understanding. This cat-
egory was recorded separately from 1998 on. The percentage of pa-
pers that require discipline specific knowledge for understanding
decreased from 1993–1997 to 1998–2002.
A large number of different types of teaching methods (over 30
in 2001 alone) are discussed in JEE. The most popular are listed in
Table 2. Over a third of the papers are about other aspects of engi-
neering education and do not address any teaching method. The
most popular teaching method described in detail was cooperative
groups during 1993–1997 and computer techniques (including the
Web) during 1998–2002. This data may be somewhat misleading
since lecture, the third most popular technique during the ten years,
was seldom the major subject of the study. It is quite possible that
many additional authors used lecture for part of the course but did
not study it or include it in the paper. As a teaching method “de-
sign” refers to having small groups of students work independently
to solve open-ended design problems.
The column on data refers to whether any type of data was pre-
sented. The data does not have to relate to teaching. The column on
assessment refers to the methods used for assessing teaching and
student learning. A very large number of methods including atten-
dance, classroom visit, creativity test, employer evaluation, essay,
focus group, individual and group interviews, number going to
graduate school, peer ratings, portfolios, projects, quiz scores, reten-
tion, self evaluation, student comments, test scores, and verbal pro-
tocols were employed. Student evaluations, the most popular as-
sessment method from 1993–1997, typically refer to the multiple
choice forms used for evaluating teaching. During the second five-
year period, surveys, which tend to be open-ended instruments that
are used for a number of purposes in addition to evaluating teach-
ing, became popular. Over the ten-year period of the combined
January 2004
studies, grades were the third most popular technique. As engineer-
ing educators become more sophisticated in assessment, an increase
in the use of more sophisticated techniques such as statistical com-
parison with a control group and verbal protocols is to be expected.
Although a reasonable number of papers cite an educational theo-
ry or learning style, such as Kolb or the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
(MBTI), less than 20 percent of the papers actually used a theory to
design or analyze the curriculum, learning or teaching. This percent-
age is based on the total number of papers. If the percentage is based
on the number of papers that address some form of teaching, the per-
centage using an education theory or learning style increases (e.g., for
1998–2002 the percentage “none” goes from 82.6% to 73.2%).
The final column in Table 2 refers to the number of useable
sources that were cited. These include articles, books, patents and
other government publications, and URL addresses for Web sites
that readers could reasonably expect to find in a comprehensive li-
brary or on the Web. No attempt was made to check if the URLs
listed were still functioning. Personal communications, papers in
preparation, reports that were not published and incomplete refer-
ences which were not considered useable are not included in the
count. The number of sources cited increased dramatically from
1993–1997 to 1998–2002. Since the average number of references
per article changed little, most of this increase was caused by the in-
creased number of articles. The range in a single article was from
zero to 178 useable references.
The tabulated results in Table 2 are subject to subjective errors,
but these errors are certainly smaller than for the keywords. Differ-
ent observers would probably decide that different articles required
discipline specific content knowledge for understanding—a person
without a technical education might think most of the articles were
not understandable! Although the teaching methods employed
were often very specifically stated, the use of lectures often had to be
inferred based on the text. Even for the column on data, there is a
small grey area over what is data—e.g., are student comments data?
Authors were not always clear on what assessment methods were
used. Student evaluations and student surveys certainly overlap.
It was also unclear if grades, test scores and GPA were separate but
related measures, or were essentially identical. However, the dis-
tinction is probably not critical. For the column on educational
theories, a judgment was made as to whether a theory was merely
being cited or it was actually being used for design or analysis. There
is a possibility that my interpretation systematically coded papers as
not using an educational theory when other observers would have
coded them as using the theory.
There were a number of minor problems with the determination
of citations. If the citation was repeated in the reference list, which
was frequent during the first five years, it was only counted once.
Thus, the counts in Table 2 are significantly less than the total num-
ber of references listed in the JEE articles. Some authors would list
multiple articles under a single number or they would list supplemen-
tal references—in these cases they were all counted if they were use-
able (the reader could reasonably expect to find them). Occasionally a
subjective judgment was required of whether the citation was useable.
III. REPORTED SOURCES OF SUPPORT
Another item of interest is what organization, if any, helped sup-
port the research or development reported in the papers (Table 3).
Journal of Engineering Education 15
No support was inferred when there was no mention of support in
the paper. For all the different types of support, the numbers refer to
the number of articles that reported that type of support. Thus,
whether a paper reported that one or ten different companies were
supporting the work, it is reported as 1 in the table. Since a number of
papers listed several sources of support, the summation of the percent-
ages for “% of funded projects” will often be greater than 100 percent.
The good news is that the number of papers reporting support for
engineering education research and development increased from 99
in the first five years to 180 in the second five years—an 80 percent
increase. The increase in the percentage of all papers that were fund-
ed—from 43% to 49%—was significantly smaller because of the
large increase in number of papers published. NSF was clearly the
dominant source of support, and the number of papers reporting
NSF support doubled from 1993–97 to 1998–2002. The number of
papers reporting “other” sources also doubled, but this was mainly
due to the seven papers supported by NCIIA in the October 2001
special issue. The number of papers reporting support from some
part of the university (provost, engineering college, department and
so forth) also almost doubled. The two most common other U.S.
government agencies were FIPSE and NASA, which supported the
work reported in nine and six papers, respectively. Canada was the
most common source from a government other than the U.S.
Table 3 contains a second piece of good news in addition to the in-
creased support for engineering education research. Since a large per-
Table 3. Reported sources of support.
Table 4. Author data.
16 Journal of Engineering Education
centage of papers (greater than 50 percent) are written by authors
without external support, engineering educators apparently feel they
can do significant work in engineering education without external sup-
port—although they certainly would be happy to receive such support.
The information on reported sources of support relys entirely on
self-reporting by the authors. Some authors were clear and listed a
number of sources in an acknowledgment section, while others mere-
ly implied in the text that the work was supported. It is also quite pos-
sible that the research was externally supported, but the authors forgot
to mention the support. Authors also made a judgment of whether to
include an acknowledgment of support from the university (provost,
dean, teaching center, college, department etc.). University support
that one group of authors considered significant and thus reported
might not be reported by another group. Thus, the numbers and per-
centages for supported projects are probably low. Thus, this table is an
accurate listing of reported sources of support, but may not be an accu-
rate listing of actual support. The monetary amount of different
sources could also be tremendously different—support amounts of
$100,000 and $100 will show up identically in Table 3.
IV. AUTHOR INFORMATION
Table 4 provides an analysis of author data based on the author
biographies. The counts listed in Table 4 are the total number of
January 2004
authors listed for each year and do not represent unique individuals
(if someone was the author of two papers, he or she is counted twice
in Table 4). The 1993 to 1997 data for the columns labeled
Women/Total and Engrs: Women/Total are from Table 2 of refer-
ence [1]. As JEE has grown in size, the number of authors and the
number of women authors has increased. The percentage of women
authors varies significantly from year-to-year, but there was an in-
crease from the 1993–1997 period to the 1998–2002 period. Look-
ing only at authors who have at least one engineering or computer
science degree, the percentages are 78.2 percent and 75.0 percent
for the 1993–1997 and 1998–2002 periods, respectively. The per-
centage of women authors who have at least one engineering or
computer science degree increased from 54.5 percent during the
first five-year period to 58.6 percent in the second five-year period.
For every year, the percentage of women authors who have at least
one engineering or computer science degree is lower than the per-
centage of all authors who are women.
The analysis of data in Table 4 on papers written by a single au-
thor is new for all ten years. A significantly lower percentage of the
published papers were written by a single author during the second
five-year period than the first. There were particularly high percent-
ages of single-author papers in 1993 and 1994. In 1994, this num-
ber was clearly biased by the January Centennial issue which had
nine papers written by a single author—four of these were originally
plenary addresses at the ASEE annual meeting. Even ignoring the
Centennial issue, there is a significant decrease in the percentage of
papers written by only one author. One possible explanation is that
as the percentage of papers that had external support increases
(Table 3), more investigators are involved in the research and, thus,
automatically become co-authors. The percentage of the single-au-
thor papers where the author is female is generally lower than the
percentage of all authors who are female. The percentage of the sin-
gle-author papers where the author has at least one engineering or
computer science degree has also generally decreased. The signifi-
cance, if any, of these trends is unclear.
Since the biographical information was not uniform and in a few
cases was missing, it was occasionally difficult and in three cases (0.3
percent) impossible to determine the author’s gender for Table 4. The
preferred approach was to look for pronouns to determine gender and
not depend on first names. It was even more difficult and common to
determine if the author had at least one degree in engineering or com-
puter science since this information was often not included. There
were ten women, twenty men and two people of unknown gender
whose backgrounds were unclear or unknown. Thus, 32/943 or 3.4%
of the total number of authors listed for the five years could not be
classified accurately. If other sources were available, they were used.
IV. CITATION ANALYSIS
Citation analysis is commonly used to evaluate the impact of
research, study productivity, and assess departments and journals
Table 5. Number of times JEE papers are cited in JEE.
January 2004
despite a number of limitations [7, 8]. Authors often cite their own
work or that of friends, work may be cited for negative reasons,
there is a lag period between publication and citation, and the sig-
nificance of work may take years to be recognized [7]. An article
may have considerable impact, but is not heavily cited because few
people are publishing in the area [8]. Self-citation rates are high and
it is common practice to remove self-cited works [8]. Despite these
problems, “citation counts are one of the better indicators of the vis-
ibility and value of research.” [7, p. 139]
The 9,414 useable citations (including self-citations) for the ten-
year period are included in a database. Every article, which cited a
useful source, is listed. Self-citations (one of the authors in the citing
paper is also an author of the cited source) are identified in the data-
base. There are 7,337 unique sources listed. The number of times
each source is cited could then be easily counted. Since self-citations
are not considered to be an indication of the use of the source by other
researchers [8], they are not included in the counts in Tables 5 to 7.
Many of the references had slight errors or missing pieces of in-
formation. If the correct information was known, the reference was
corrected and included in the citation database. With common last
names (e.g., Smith, Jones, or Lee) the authors’ initials are extremely
important for determining who wrote the article. Unfortunately,
the middle initial was often missing and there were clearly a number
of cases where the reference used the wrong initials. (Authors with
unusual last names clearly have an advantage in this regard.) In ad-
dition, for several years JEE asked authors to list references as the
first author et al. if there were more than three authors (fortunately,
this practice no longer exists). This makes it difficult to determine if
the reference was self-cited, which would cause an over count in
Tables 6 and 7. On the other hand, an undercount would result for
an author in Table 7 if they were buried in the et al. If the cited et al.
paper was a JEE paper, the source was checked and all authors were
included in the database.
The number of times that all of the papers published in JEE dur-
ing 1993 and 1994 were later cited in JEE during the five year
period from 1993 to 1997 [1] and the ten year period from 1993 to
2002 were determined. The results are shown in Table 5. During
the first five-year period, which is at least four years after publication
of the 1993 papers and at least three years after the publication of
the 1994 papers, the median number of times a paper was cited is
zero [1]. During the ten-year period (at least nine years after 1993
papers and at least eight years after 1994 papers were published) the
median number of times a paper was cited increased to one. The
mode for both years during both periods is zero. Most papers in
JEE will be rarely cited in JEE. This is humbling, but not surprising
since most scientific journal articles are cited zero or once [8]. The
average numbers of citations are higher than the medians because
heavily cited papers skew them. The higher average for 1993 is
caused more by the presence of three highly cited papers [9–11],
than by the extra year.
The major cited sources for the five-year period from 1993 to
1997 were listed in reference [1]. The corresponding list for the
Journal of Engineering Education 17
 Table 6. Major cited references in JEE from 1993 to 2002.
entire ten-year period from 1993 to 2002 is shown in Table 6. A
minimum of ten citations was used as an arbitrary cutoff. Items that
contain essentially identical information, such as the different cita-
tion years for ABET Criteria 2000 and recent engineering accredi-
tation criteria, are grouped together in this table. It is remarkable
that the most cited source, ABET Criteria 2000 [12], did not exist
until 1997 and did not appear in the first five year table [1]. This is a
strong indicator of how much the new ABET rules captured the at-
tention of engineering educators. The citations for ABET Criteria
2000 includes 21 citations of the ABET Web page from 1999 to
2002. This was the only heavily cited Web page. The second most
cited source by Felder and Silverman [13] was the most cited source
from 1993 to 1997. The oldest source listed is the 1953 preliminary
edition of what is now commonly called Bloom’s Taxonomy [14],
while the most recent is the 2002 version of ABET’s Web page
[12]. The median year of the sources in Table 6 is 1993, while the
median year for the previous five-year listing was 1991[1]. Eight of
the sources in the five-year list, which had an arbitrary cutoff of five
citations, did not make the cut for Table 6 while the other twelve
did. This illustrates that papers have a period of maximum visibility
during which time they are most likely to be cited, and then the
number of citations tends to decrease as more recent papers are
cited instead. The exceptions are the rare papers such as [13] that
become classics. Books appear to have a longer citation life than
journal articles.
The authors and organizations that had 20 or more citations from
1993 through 2002 are listed in Table 7. These authors and organiza-
tions had considerable impact on the engineering education literature
during this ten-year period. As expected, there is considerable but not
complete carryover from Table 6. Four of the 33 names are organiza-
tions, and they are all in the top six in Table 7. There are 42 authors
listed in Tables 6 and 7. Twelve (28.6 percent) of these authors are
women (Agogino, Atman, Cross, Hewitt, McCaulley, Olds, Rogers,
Sando, Seymour, Sheppard, Silverman, and Tobias).
18 Journal of Engineering Education
One remarkable aspect of engineering educators is their willing-
ness to work with, listen to, and even reward non-engineers. The
data in Table 4 shows that over the ten-year period 351 of the 1,470
authors (23.9 percent) did not have an engineering or computer sci-
ence degree. Nineteen of the 42 authors (45.2 percent) in Tables 6
and 7 do not have at least one engineering or computer science de-
gree (Angelo, Astin, Bloom, Boyer, Cross, Hewitt, D. W. Johnson,
R. T. Johnson, Kolb, McCaulley, Olds, Oreovicz, Perry, Rogers,
Sando, Seymour, Silverman, Solow and Tobias) although at least
six of them worked with engineers or in engineering programs
when the cited work was done. Since Tables 6 and 7 represent the
most heavily cited works and most cited authors, the 45.2 percent
without an engineering or computer science degree illustrates the
willingness and necessity of the authors of JEE papers to go outside
the engineering education literature for their sources. These authors
and their contributions are highly valued in engineering education.
Nine of them were ERM distinguished lecturers (Angelo, Bloom,
Boyer, Cross, the Johnson brothers, Perry, Seymour, and Tobias—
the only engineer included was Felder). It is doubtful that profes-
sionals in other fields, such law or medicine, are as respectful of
contributors whose degrees are outside their field.
During the development of the citation database, it was obvious
that some authors used an earlier paper’s reference list as the basis
for their reference list. Very occasionally, authors of a paper would
follow identically the reference list used by another paper instead of
using that list as the starting point for an independent literature
search. This is disturbing since at the minimum it probably illus-
trates the lack of due diligence in doing a literature search. [One re-
viewer considered this practice to be unethical.]
The authors listed in Table 7 have clearly had an impact on the
engineering education literature. Two-thirds of the authors who
have at least one degree in engineering or computer science have
won a national or society award from ASEE or are fellows of ASEE.
Nine of the authors are Fellows of ASEE, six have won the ASEE
January 2004

Table 7. Most cited authors and organizations in JEE from
1993 to 2002.
Chester F. Carlson award, two the ASEE Donald E. Marlowe
award, and two the ASEE George Westinghouse award. Although
only three of the authors listed in Table 7 have won the ASEE
William Elgin Wickenden award for best paper in JEE, they have
won a total of seven Wickenden awards. One of the authors won
the NSF Bernard M. Gordon prize. Of course, there are many
other ways to have a positive impact on engineering education be-
sides writing papers. At the time this article was written, none of the
authors listed in Table 7 have won any of the other National and
Society awards (division and sectional awards were not checked)
presented by ASEE including the Benjamin Garver Lamme award,
which is the most prestigious ASEE award.
VI. INTERPRETATIONS AND SUGGESTIONS
The Journal of Engineering Education is becoming an archival
journal containing research articles of high quality. This is based on
the analysis of the data presented previously and on the importance
the editors and reviewers are placing on the 2003 guidelines [5].
First, both the keyword and the citation analyses show that the con-
tent coverage of JEE is very broad. Since engineering education is
necessarily broad, this is healthy. The keywords reflect both current
concerns (e.g., assessment and ABET) and continuing concerns
January 2004
(e.g., teaching and design). Thus, the journal appears to be publish-
ing papers of concern to engineering educators. Second, the
decrease in percentage of papers that require discipline specific
knowledge for understanding is a positive development since it
makes more articles in JEE accessible to all readers. Papers that
must have a high content of discipline specific knowledge can be
published in the proceedings of the ASEE meetings or in disci-
pline-oriented journals such as the IEEE Transactions on Education.
Third, the increase in the fraction of papers that include data from
1993–1997 to 1998–2002 is another indicator that JEE is publish-
ing a higher fraction of papers that are applying quantitative analy-
ses to the study of engineering education. Fourth, the citations ap-
pear to be somewhat more accurate and have fewer obvious errors
than in the early years. Fifth, the increasing external support for en-
gineering education research is heartening. At the same time the
large number of papers that are published with no external support
shows that the delicate balance between the availability and the
need for external support has been maintained. This balance has
been almost totally lost in technical research since it is often impos-
sible to do technical research without external support. Sixth, au-
thors are drawn from all engineering disciplines and no one engi-
neering discipline dominates. Authors are also quite willing to cite
sources from other disciplines. Finally, there has been a slow, but
apparently steady increase in the percentage of women authors, and
an even higher percentage of the most cited authors are women. Al-
though none of these items by themselves proves that JEE became
more research oriented during the ten-year period, the cumulative
effect is very strong evidence.
Of course, JEE is not perfect and there are minor problems that
can be improved. Although there was modest improvement, the
lack of use of educational theories and learning styles is disappoint-
ing. However, the use of these theories has increased and four pa-
pers listed in Table 6 are educational theories [10, 17, 22, 23] while
two papers are on learning styles [13, 25]. The very low median
number of times JEE papers are cited later in JEE remains disturb-
ing although the citation numbers for JEE match the general values
for science [8]. Authors should be encouraged to do more thorough
literature reviews. More uniformity in reporting external sources of
support would be useful. Assessments by surveys and student evalu-
ations are probably over used, and other assessment techniques are
probably under utilized.
Prior to the 2003 guidelines [5] JEE still published some opin-
ion papers that contained no data and in some cases no references.
Papers of the type “we tried this method and it was great” and that
contain no data other than student evaluations were still published
although the number had decreased. After the 2003 guidelines,
more appropriate venues for these papers are the proceedings of an
ASEE conference. The presence of papers that clearly would not
meet the January 2003 standards diluted the overall research quali-
ty of the journal despite the improvement in quality of many re-
search papers. Most professional societies in science and engineer-
ing separated their research journals from their magazines many
years ago. ASEE started this process in 1993 when JEE and
PRISM were published separately. Following the January 2003
guidelines should complete this process and lead to JEE rapidly
approaching or surpassing the quality level of many technical re-
search journals.
The inclusion of selected papers from conferences was a stroke
of genius and has improved the quality of papers in JEE. Another
Journal of Engineering Education 19
welcome addition might be critical reviews commissioned by the
journal editor in areas of significant interest to the readers of JEE.
They would probably be useful and widely read. At least one review
paper has been extensively cited [29]. Many technical journals have
found that critical reviews can enhance the overall quality of the
journal. Meta-analysis has had a significant impact in educational
research and would also be appropriate for JEE.
Although focusing JEE on scholarly research will fill a need of
engineering education, some valuable papers and contributions to
engineering education are likely to be lost. For example, the majority
of the references listed on Table 6 had other purposes and are not
research papers. Four JEE papers published during the ten year pe-
riod [9, 10, 11, 29] and two Engineering Education papers [13, 22]
published earlier are on this list. These six papers have withstood
the test of time and had significant impact on engineering educa-
tion. However, some of them would have probably have difficulty
being published under the new guidelines [5] since they are not and
were not meant to be scholarly research papers. Some editorial flexi-
bility for both JEE and PRISM will be required to ensure that im-
portant papers written by engineering educators but not reporting
scholarly research have a society-wide venue for publication. An ap-
propriate example of this is the recent publication of the inaugural
Bernard M. Gordon lecture [32].
Overall, the conclusion is that JEE is becoming “an archival
record of scholarly research in engineering education,” [4] and it is
steadily improving. The past and current editors are commended
for their efforts and encouraged to stay the course.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The comments of the reviewers and the editor were very helpful
in improving this paper.
REFERENCES
[1] Wankat, P.C., “An Analysis of the Articles in the Journal of Engi-
neering Education,” Journal of Engineering Education, vol. 88, no. 1, 1999,
pp. 37–42.
[2] Ernst, E.W., “The Editor’s Page,” Journal of Engineering Education,
vol. 82, no. 1, 1993, p. 1.
[3] “Guide for Authors,” Journal of Engineering Education, vol. 82, no.
1, 1993, inside back cover.
[4] Lohmann, J. R., “The Editor’s Page,” Journal of Engineering Educa-
tion, vol. 92, no. 1, 2003, p. 1.
[5] “Guide for Authors,” Journal of Engineering Education, vol. 92, no.
1, 2003, inside back cover.
[6] Lohmann, J.R., “The Editor’s page,” Journal of Engineering Educa-
tion, vol. 91, no. 2, 2002, p. 147.
[7] Centra, J.A. Reflective Faculty Evaluation, Jossey-Bass, San
Francisco, 1993.
[8] Creamer, E.G., Assessing Faculty Publication Productivity: Issues of
Equity, ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report, vol. 26, no. 2, Washing-
ton D.C.: The George Washington University, Graduate School of Edu-
cation and Human Development, 1998.
[9] Bordogna, J., E. Fromm, and E.W. Ernst, “Engineering Educa-
tion: Innovation Through Integration,” Journal of Engineering Education,
vol. 82, no. 1, 1993, pp. 3–8.
20 Journal of Engineering Education
[10] Harb, J.N., S.O. Durrant, and R.E. Terry, “Use of the Kolb
Learning Cycle and the 4MAT System in Engineering Education,”
Journal of Engineering Education, vol. 82, no. 2, 1993, pp. 70–77.
[11] Quinn, R.G., Drexel’s E4 Program: A Different Professional
Experience for Engineering Students and Faculty,” Journal of Engineering
Education, vol. 82, no. 4, 1993, pp. 196–202.
[12] ABET, “Engineering Criteria 2000: Criteria for Accrediting
Programs in Engineering in the United States,” Accreditation Board
for Engineering and Technology, Inc., Baltimore, MD. Also http://www.
abet.org/eac/eac2000.htm (various URL’s are reported), 1997–2002.
[13] Felder, R.M. and L.K. Silverman, “Learning and Teaching Styles
in Engineering Education,” Engineering Education, vol. 78, no. 7, 1988,
pp. 674–681.
[14] Bloom, B.S. (Ed.), Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. The Classi-
fication of Educational Goals. Handbook I: Cognitive Domain, David McKay
Co., New York, 1953 (preliminary edition), 1956, 1986.
[15] Wankat, P.C. and F.S. Oreovicz, Teaching Engineering, Mc-
Graw-Hill Inc., New York, 1993. Available free at [https://Engineering.
Purdue.edu/ChE/News_and_Events/Teaching_Engineering].
[16] American Society for Engineering Education, “Engineering
Education for a Changing World,” (N.R. Augustine and C.M. Vest,
co-chairs), ASEE PRISM, vol. 4, no. 4, December 1994, pp. 20–27.
[17] Kolb, D.A., Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of
Learning and Development, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1984.
[18] Angelo, T.A. and K.P. Cross, Classroom Assessment Techniques,
2nd ed., Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 1993, and revised edition, 1994.
[19] Johnson, D.W., R.T. Johnson, and K.A. Smith, Active Learning:
Cooperation in the College Classroom, Interaction Book Company, Edina,
MN, 1991.
[20] Tobias, S., They’re Not Dumb, They’re Different. Stalking the Second
Tier, Research Corporation, Tucson, AZ, 1990, 1994.
[21] Dertouzos, M.L., R.K. Lester, and R.M. Solow, Made in America:
Regaining the Productive Edge, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1989.
[22] Stice, J.E., “Using Kolb’s Learning Cycle to Improve Student
Learning,” Engineering Education, vol. 77, no. 5, Feb., 1987, pp. 291–296.
[23] Perry, W.G., Jr., Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the
College Years. A Scheme, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., New York, 1970.
[24] Boyer, E.L., Scholarship Reconsidered. Priorities of the Professoriate,
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Princeton,
NJ, 1990.
[25] Felder, R.M., “Matters of Style,” ASEE PRISM, December
1996, pp. 18–23.
[26] Johnson, D.W., R.T. Johnson, and K.A. Smith, Cooperative
Learning: Increasing College Faculty Instructional Productivity, ASHE-ERIC,
Higher Education Report No. 4, George Washington University, 1991.
[27] National Research Council, “Engineering Education: Developing
an Adaptive System,” National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 1995.
[28] American Society for Engineering Education, “A National Ac-
tion Agenda for Engineering Education,” Report of an ASEE Task Force
(E. E. David, Jr., Chair), Washington, D.C., 1987.
[29] Dutson, A.J., R.H. Todd, S.P. Magleby and C.D. Sorensen, “A
Review of Literature on Teaching Engineering Design through Project-
oriented Capstone Courses,” Journal of Engineering Education, vol. 86, no.
1, 1997, pp. 17–28.
[30] Rogers, G.M. and J.K. Sando, Stepping Ahead: An Assessment Plan
Development Guide, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Terre Haute,
IN, 1996.
[31] Seymour, E. and N. Hewitt, Talking About Leaving—Factors Con-
tributing to High Attrition Rates Among Science, Mathematics and Engineering
January 2004
Undergraduate Majors, A Final Report to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Bu-
reau of Sociological Research, University of Colorado—Boulder, April 1994.
[32] Fromm, E. “The Changing Engineering Educational Paradigm,”
Journal of Engineering Education, vol. 92, no. 2, 2003, pp. 113–121.
AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY
Phillip C. Wankat is the Head of Interdisciplinary Engineering
and the Clifton L. Lovell Distinguished Professor of Chemical
January 2004
Engineering at Purdue University. He earned his BSChE from
Purdue, his Ph.D. from Princeton University, and a MSED from
Purdue. His technical research is in separation processes and he is
interested in improving teaching and learning in engineering edu-
cation. His contacts with JEE have been as an author, reviewer and
dedicated reader.
Address: School of Chemical Engineering, Purdue University,
Forney Hall of Chemical Engineering, 480 Stadium Mall Drive,
West Lafayette, IN 47907-2100; telephone: 765-494-7422;
e-mail: wankat@ecn.purdue.edu.
Journal of Engineering Education 21