A New Paradigm for a New Field: Communicating Representations of Engineering Education Research

Based on a three-year experience of developing, facilitating, and assessing NSF-funded workshops on Rigorous Research in Engineering Education (RREE), the authors present four repre-sentations of engineering education scholarly work in the United States, specifically teaching and research. Many of the representa-tions describe the relationships between engineering research, education research, teaching, and assessment. For each of the representations, assessment data are presented to evaluate which aspects resonated with workshop participants and which needed to be changed for wide acceptance by a U.S. engineering educa-tion audience. It was found that participants preferred continua to dichotomy and were more receptive to models that were intro-duced inductively through active learning exercises. Lessons learned, implications for the field, and future plans for further development of the paradigm are also included