Do Brazilian Engineering Professors Do Engineering Education Research in Active Learning? A Case Study

While in countries like Brazil, the concern is still the training of instructors in the use of active learning strategies and methods, in countries such as the United States, Denmark, Sweden, Australia, for at least two decades, research has been placed at the service of teaching and teacher professional development and projects are developed so that research in Engineering Education is carried out with greater rigor. In this context, this research work aims to evaluate a set of interventions presented at the 43rd edition of the Brazilian Congress in Engineering Education (COBENGE), from the year 2015, because of the theme of the event: “Active Learning: Collaborative Engineers for a Competitive World. Thirty-six papers presented in this edition of COBENGE and that were related to active learning were analyzed to determine whether they are papers that address interventions such as an effective teaching (ET), a scholarly teaching (ST), a scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) or an engineering education research (EER) work. Our results show that from the 36 papers analyzed 25 are ET, 1 is ST, 2 are SoTL, 4 are EER works, and 4 could not be characterized in any of the levels. We present and discuss the approach built for the analysis performed based on the characteristics pointed out by the literature for ET, ST, SoTL and EER. It is worth pointing out that ST and SoTL are concepts little known to the Brazilian EE community. This research work is a starting point to evaluate the state of engineering education research in Active Learning in Brazil