Resumen de Development of a Taxonomy of Keywords for Engineering Education Research
Cynthia J. Finelli, Maura Borrego, Golnoosh Rasoulifar
The diversity of engineeringeducation research provides anopportunity for cross-fertilization of ideas andcreativity, but italso can result in fragmentation of the field and duplication of effort. One solution is to establish a standardized taxonomyof engineering education terms to map the field and communicate and connect research initiatives. Thisreport describes theprocess for developing such a taxonomy, the EER Taxonomy. Although the taxonomy focuses on engineering educationresearch in the United States, inclusive efforts have engaged 266 individuals from 149 cities in 30 countries during onemultiday workshop, seven conference sessions, and several other virtual and in-person activities. The resulting taxonomycomprises 455 terms arranged in 14 branches and six levels. This taxonomy was found to satisfy four criteria for validityand reliability: (1) keywords assigned to a set of abstracts were reproducible by multiple researchers, (2) the taxonomycomprised terms that could be selected as keywords to fully describe 243 articles in three journals, (3) the keywords forthose 243 articles were evenly distributed across the branches of the taxonomy, and (4) the authors of 31 conference papersagreed with 90% of researcher-assigned keywords. This report also describes guidelines developed to help authorsconsistently assign keywords for their articles by encouraging them to choose terms from three categories: (1) context/focus/topic, (2) purpose/target/motivation, and (3) research approach.
