Studying factors that influence scholar retention in engineering education research

Abstract

Engineering Education Research (EER) has become a rapidly growing and diverse community over the past two decades. Scholars from various engineering disciplines, computer science, and other fields such as education have joined to share their experiences and developed fundamentals for this new domain. Among the newcomers, some eventually become active players while some decide to opt out. To sustain scholar diversity and community development, it is essential to understand the overall retention status and factors that influence new scholars' tendency for leaving EER. In this paper, we perform a large-scale bibliometric analysis on 21,209 FIE/ASEE papers and 8,040 EER-related NSF awards to develop a community-wide understanding of scholar retention in EER. We further recognize and compare two groups: opt-out scholars and retained scholars in terms of their academic profiles such as level of engagement, collaboration, research areas, affiliations, and funding status. Our findings show the decreasing retention rate from 2000 to 2011 and an average of 5.23 years for which new scholars stayed active in the EER community. During their early career in EER, scholars who decided to quickly opt out tended to commit less effort and had fewer original contributions to their research studies in EER. Also, they worked on broader and fundamental topics and received less EER-related financial support than their peers in the retained group. To the best of our knowledge, the present study is the first attempt to study scholar retention at large scale and also the first quantitative effort to measure scholar retention based on bibliometric data within engineering education research. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2013.