On an Upward Trend: Reflection in Engineering Education

Abstract

Abstract Reflection in Engineering: On an Upward TrendIn recent years, reflection has become an increasingly studied and valued portion of theeducation process for engineers. Reflection can help students to identify themselves in thebroader context of engineering by understanding the implications of their work and how theircollege experience prepares them to make significant, thoughtful, and responsible contributionsto the field of engineering. Reflection in engineering education, which can be facilitated byreflective activities, is largely defined as the process by which students recall certain experiencesand evaluate them using a variety of lenses to assign significance or meaning to thatexperience. Given the arguable importance of reflection to engineering education, we areinterested in exploring the question: how much explicit, named attention has reflection receivedin engineering education scholarship and how do we interpret these results?We conducted a literature search and review to better understand the role of reflection inengineering education scholarship through assessing the number of papers that involve reflectionin some way. We were interested in the number of papers that use the word reflection and someof its derivatives, such as reflect and reflexivity, in the title and body of the papers. We looked attwo engineering education conferences, the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE)and Frontiers in Education (FIE), and sorted through many papers published throughout theyears. Both ASEE and FIE facilitate numerous publications at conferences each year with an eyeto broaden educational perspectives and to share techniques and understandings. We employeddifferent search strategies to ensure an accurate capture of relevant papers, and also sortedthrough the results manually to eliminate duplicates or instances where reflection is not used asdescribed in this paper.In this paper, we will present our results on the explicit discussion of the role of reflection andreflective activities in engineering education. For example, we have discovered that the idea ofreflection in ASEE and FIE publications has seen significant growth from a combined 20 papersin the respective conferences formative year, to a total of over 350 papers in the year 2014,increasing in a linear fashion. The quantitative publication findings prompt us to investigatefurther. For example, why has the topic of reflection, being understood as important in thedevelopment of an engineer in an educational setting, had limited traction in engineeringeducation publications and discussions?Furthermore, in the global discussion on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM),we recognize that reflection is considered to be a key aspect in meeting the goal of developing awell rounded and critically thinking technical force. To meet this goal, it is imperative to addressreflective techniques in our research as well as to incorporate them into the classroom. Ourinvestigation of the trend in explicit discussions of reflection, and identifying potential reasonsbehind this trend, will concentrate more attention on the importance of reflection, ultimatelycontributing to the transformation of engineering education.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 43 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.