Editors’ Note

The history of engineering education as a scholarly field can be traced back at least a hundred years. In the u.s., for example, the journal Engineering Education (now Journal of Engineering Education) was founded in 1916, while one of the earliest known dissertations that reported results from an empirical study of engineering teaching and learning was published in 1929. 1 Yet only more recently has engineering education started to look like an emerging discipline in its own right. This trend has been accompanied by the establishment of critically important infrastructures to grow and sustain the field, including new research centers, graduate degree programs, academic departments, publication outlets, conferences, and funding sources. 2

While these and other signs of the field’s growth can be found worldwide, growing concerns have also been expressed about a lack of global connections among engineering education scholars. In response, European and American leaders in the field launched a 2007 initiative called “Advancing the Global Capacity for Engineering Education Research” (agceer). One outcome of this effort was a research report proposing some possible frameworks and strategies for scaling up international collaborations in engineering education. 3 The report especially emphasized the need for scholars around the world to learn and collaborate with another, including by exploring how empirical research findings from specific local contexts might illuminate and reform educational practices, policymaking, and work practices elsewhere.

Examples of such global interactions can certainly be found, but they remain more the exception than the rule. Indeed, we have been struck by a lack of dialog among countries and regions that graduate the largest numbers of engineers and other technical professionals. This is especially surprising given related trends such as the worldwide diffusion and adoption of accreditation criteria and procedures from u.s.-based abet, Inc. under the Washington Accord framework.

This special issue represents another small step toward growing global capacity for engineering education scholarship. It originates from a budding partnership between two leading engineering institutions on opposite sides of the globe, namely Purdue University and Tsinghua University. In addition to formal institutional agreements between the two institutions, Purdue is home to the first of its kind department of engineering education in the College of Engineering, and Tsinghua is home to the Chinese Academy of Engineering-Tsinghua University Center for Engineering Education. These corresponding entities provide a complementary and evolving perspective on engineering education issues and their relation to Chinese education. One of the major goals of this special issue is to demonstrate that engineering education scholars from China, the u.s., and other nations have much to learn from one another. We intend for the papers in this volume to show the benefits of crossing language, cultural, and national boundaries. 4

In addition to building bridges between different cultures of engineering education research, this issue highlights the importance of engineering education as a lens for better understanding the Chinese educational landscape. Over the past thirty years, China’s contributions to science and technology have drastically increased, driven by a large human capital base, the local prestige of academia, a vast diaspora of Chinese-origin scientists, and a central government that invests heavily in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (stem). 5 Indeed, the looming obstacle of a great need for more and better engineering and stem talent continues to present challenges for Chinese educational policymakers. Whether researchers or education leaders are exploring students in China and domestic measurement questions or the activities of Chinese students abroad, the study of engineering education issues for Chinese education is a pressing and little-studied sub-topic.

As further framing for the papers presented in this volume, we find it useful to introduce three guiding classification frameworks. First and most generally, the papers in this issue have been solicited and reviewed in two distinct categories: research papers and program reports, with partially distinct criteria and expectations for scholarly quality applied to each. Second, we find it useful to connect the scholarship presented herein to the five categories of engineering education scholarship as presented in the 2014 Cambridge Handbook of Engineering Education Research: Engineering Thinking and Knowing, Engineering Learning Mechanisms and Approaches, Engineering Education and Institutional Practices, Pathways into Diversity and Inclusiveness, and Research Methods and Assessment. 6 Third and finally, the papers in this volume nicely lend themselves to categorization based on a micro-meso-macro scale framework, such as that proposed by Bocong, to help capture the relative scope of the five works in question. 7

To begin, the two empirical research papers that serve as cornerstones for this special issue provide good examples of micro-level studies based on in-depth examinations of learning among relatively small numbers of students. More specifically, the contribution by Zhu and colleagues offers two important new perspectives on the epistemological cognitive development of undergraduate engineering students: first, in applying Perry’s theory of student development specifically to engineers, and, second, in applying this framework to Chinese students. The empirical study additionally provides insight via two triangulated forms of validity—expert content validation and structural validation via factor analysis. As a study mainly concerned with both engineering epistemology and assessment tool development, the paper pushes readers to consider the benefits of developing and deploying survey instruments that are culturally relevant, with robust evidence of reliability and validity evaluated across different cultural contexts.

The paper by Zhou, on the other hand, tackles a professional and personal characteristic that is not often researched in engineering education: humor. The authors provide a qualitative window into the perception and use of humor in engineering design teams, including the position of humor in students’ thought processes and their perceptions of humor within the engineering project environment. As this paper helps show, culture and the cultural relevance of humor play an important mediating role in the use of humor in an engineering education context. The micro-level empirical perspectives of the first two papers offer insights that fall into the Handbook’s categories of Research Methods and Assessment and Engineering Thinking and Knowing. They encourage the reader to consider the cultural relevance and validity of metrics and ways of assessing and understanding individual engineering students’ cognitive and social development.

The third and fourth contributions to this volume offer “meso-level” views of engineering education through scholarly reports on program development and reform at the single and multi-institutional levels. For starters, the paper by Zou offers a detailed description of ongoing efforts to transform the engineering curriculum and learning environment at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (hkust) in response to a wide variety of pressures. This paper is notable for its in-depth and scholarly discussion of some key reforms and programs already implemented, including student learning communities, common core courses, authentic capstone learning experiences, and expanded community engagement. The author also provides a forthright discussion of some barriers that may inhibit further curricular reforms. While some of these challenges are somewhat context specific, still other issues will likely be very familiar to readers from engineering institutions all over the world. This contribution serves as a good example of scholarship in the Engineering Education and Institutional Practices and Engineering Learning Mechanisms and Approaches categories.

A fourth contribution, from Marin and Tzen, discusses ten years of experience developing and growing the Sino-French School for Engineering at Shanghai University (utseus). Their report is very timely given the increasing number of cross-national partnerships and initiatives in higher education. This paper offers a valuable discussion of the initiative’s historical and cultural backdrops, including to illuminate how distinct French and Chinese approaches to engineering education have been negotiated over time. While the topics presented in this paper cut across the Handbook’s categories, the authors make a notable contribution to scholarship in the area of Pathways into Diversity and Inclusiveness by discussing various efforts to improve the ability of utseus-affiliated students and faculty to negotiate marked differences in language, culture, and pedagogy.

The fifth and final paper in the volume shifts our attention to a “macro-level” perspective on engineering education, namely by reporting on the Plan for Educating and Training Outstanding Engineers (petoe). This initiative represents an ambitious and forward-looking effort to transform engineering education at more than 200 universities, including through extensive coordination and engagement with many government agencies and more than 10,000 industry partners. This report sits firmly in the broadest category of engineering education scholarship—Engineering Education and Institutional Practices. This paper sheds further light on the policy mechanisms at the heart of petoe, while reporting extensive data on the number of students impacted to date, and describing some specific challenges that could blunt the initiative’s impacts and future expansion. This report offers a fascinating glimpse into educational policymaking in the Chinese context, while candidly describing a cutting-edge effort to align engineering education with industry needs.

As this overview suggests, the papers in this volume offer diverse glimpses of engineering education scholarship in China and beyond. In fact, the empirical findings and program reports published here represent a unique first opportunity for English-language audiences to read and engage with the novel findings and information provided by the contributors. The kinds of issues discussed in these papers also reflect a host of contemporary issues in higher education more broadly: the demand for measurement tools to better understand cognitive and non-cognitive development, the growth of international and cross-national programs, and the navigation of standardized and outcome-focused accountability systems. Given the large and growing importance of engineering education for China and for Chinese students abroad, engineering education is a salient context in which to investigate more universal education questions. We hope that this issue will inspire future cross-institutional and cross-national collaborations in engineering education, as we ourselves consider ways in which to learn from our Purdue-Tsinghua partnership and support engineering students, faculty, and practitioners. The field will benefit from a more aware, enriched, and globally-interconnected community of engineering education scholars.

In closing, we thank our colleagues at Tsinghua University for inviting us to co-edit this special issue; the authors of the included papers for their collegiality, responsiveness, and willingness to contribute their work; a host of anonymous peer reviewers who evaluated all of the contributions and provided excellent feedback to further improve the papers; and the Engineering Education graduate students who helped proofread and prepare the final manuscripts. In coming months and years we look forward to continuing the cross-cultural dialog seeded by this special issue.