Keyword, field, & social network analysis trends for K-12 engineering education research

Abstract

This project serves the purpose of defining K-12 engineering education research (K-12 EngER), building a database of publications, tracing analyzing trends, and tracing researchers in this field. This has been achieved in terms of the discipline's methodical publications. A manually generated list of words relevant in K-12 engineering education research (K-12 EngER) was used to compile a sub-database consisting of bibliometric information from scholarly journals taken from the Web of Science® (WoS) database created by the staff from an institute devoted to engineering education research at a Midwestern university. These keywords were then used to evaluate current trends of contribution in this research field by year. In addition, the sub-database allowed for a network between authors and the relationships between their productivity and corporations to be analyzed via social network analysis. Furthermore, the databases were used to determine which fields have contributed the most to K-12 EngR. This project contributes to the field of EngER in that, it allows for a systematic, organized overview of K-12 EngER and allows for analysis of this relatively new field. This study could also guide K-12 EngER researchers to choose their research topics, to look for research collaborators, and to explore niche research areas. The major findings resulted as follows: (1) K-12 EngER has just began to take shape and grow in the last 10 years, (2) the most popular keywords such as STEM, stud*, teac* and curricul* reveal the topics that have been most researched in the past, (3) Engineering Education (EngE) epistemologies have been the most researched area, (4) high school is the most researched for a K-12 EngE curriculum, (5) elementary education compared to other grade levels is underrepresented in EngER, (6) there is low level of connectivity between researchers in this area, (7) Krause, S. is the "most popular" author according to social network analysis, and (8) the field that has done the most research in this area is "Education, Scientific Disciplines", which indicates that most venues to publish K-12 EngER are educational rather than engineering venues. © 2012 American Society for Engineering Education.