On an upward trend: Reflection in engineering education

Abstract

In this paper, we are interested in exploring the question: how much explicit, named attention has reflection received in engineering education scholarship and how do we interpret these results? We conducted a systematic literature review of the ASEE (American Society of Engineering Education) conference publications to better understand the role of reflection in engineering education scholarship through assessing the number of papers that involve reflection in some way. In our search, we categorized the publications by scope of reflection: the extent to which reflection is mentioned, and type of reflection: how reflection is being operationalized. As a result of our findings, it is evident that there has been a significant and recognizable upward trend in the explicit attention to reflection across the body of the ASEE conference publications. Understanding the trends of reflection across literature can help us further analyze its prevalence and importance in the engineering education community.