International engineering education journals: Past, present and potential research directions

Abstract

Past and present experiences have many times proven beneficial for future inquiries as they help us to see the trends in many fields of activities. This manuscript summarizes the evolution of research topics in a well-known international engineering educational journal and offers a condense recollection of research topics for future scientific investigations. The selected journal for text data investigation is the European Journal of Engineering Education spanning from 1978-2012. In order to confirm extracted topics, but also to account for complementary topics, 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 evolved over a period spanning approximately three decades. The results indicate the overall engineering education has evolved from teaching basic engineering and design skills, computers, systems and processes; to creative teaching strategies and didactic curriculums, integrated design technologies and developing technologies; to simulation, quality in higher education, and distance learning; to information communication technology, assessment/accreditation, sustainable technology and project-based training; and to engineering management, women engineering careers, and undergraduate engineering research. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2013.