Studying Factors that Influence Scholar Retention in Engineering Education Research

Engineering Education Research (EER) has become a rapidly growing and diverse community over the past two decades. Scholars from various engineering disciplines, computer science, and other fields such as education have joined to share their experiences and developed fundamentals for this new domain. Among the newcomers, some eventually become active players while some decide to opt out. To sustain scholar diversity and community development, it is essential to understand the overall retention status and factors that influence new scholars’ tendency for leaving EER. In this paper, we perform a large-scale bibliometric analysis on 21,209 FIE/ASEE papers and 8,040 EER-related NSF awards to develop a community-wide understanding of scholar retention in EER. We further recognize and compare two groups: opt-out scholars and retained scholars in terms of their academic profiles such as level of engagement, collaboration, research areas, affiliations, and funding status. Our findings show the decreasing retention rate from 2000 to 2011 and an average of 5.23 years for which new scholars stayed active in the EER community. During their early career in EER, scholars who decided to quickly opt out tended to commit less effort and had fewer original contributions to their research studies in EER. Also, they worked on broader and fundamental topics and received less EER-related financial support than their peers in the retained group. To the best of our knowledge, the present study is the first attempt to study scholar retention at large scale and also the first quantitative effort to measure scholar retention based on bibliometric data within engineering education research.

[1]  S. Sheppard,et al.  Taking Stock: An Analysis of the Publishing Record as Represented by the Journal of Engineering Education , 2004 .

[2]  C. Bester,et al.  The retention of academics in the early career phase : empirical research , 2008 .

[3]  Daniel I. Ress,et al.  Does Unionization Increase Faculty Retention , 1994 .

[4]  Phillip C. Wankat,et al.  Analysis of the First Ten Years of the Journal of Engineering Education , 2004 .

[5]  Susan G. Broyles,et al.  Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). , 1994 .

[6]  J. Dunham-Taylor,et al.  What goes around comes around: improving faculty retention through more effective mentoring. , 2008, Journal of professional nursing : official journal of the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.

[7]  J. P. Mohsen,et al.  Creating a Culture for Scholarly and Systematic Innovation in Engineering Education , 2009 .

[8]  Matthew P. Nagowski.  Associate Professor Turnover at America's Public and Private Institutions of Higher Education , 2006 .

[9]  Maura Borrego,et al.  Mapping local trajectories of engineering education research to catalyze cross-national collaboration , 2009 .

[10]  Geoff Potvin,et al.  For the Love of Learning Science: Connecting Learning Orientation and Career Productivity in Physics and Chemistry. , 2010 .

[11]  K. Cockrell,et al.  The Holmes Scholars Network: A Study of the Holmes Group Initiative for Recruitment and Retention of Minority Faculty , 1999 .

[12]  A. Tenbrunsel,et al.  Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes , 2013 .

[13]  Jay R. Dee.  TURNOVER INTENT IN AN URBAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE: STRATEGIES FOR FACULTY RETENTION , 2004 .

[14]  H. Arkes,et al.  The Psychology of Sunk Cost , 1985 .

[15]  Liz Whitelegg.  Retention of young female post-doc physics researchers in the UK , 2004 .

[16]  Vivian Reznik,et al.  Improving the retention of underrepresented minority faculty in academic medicine. , 2006, Journal of the National Medical Association.

[17]  Peggy S. Meszaros,et al.  Improving Campus Climate to Support Faculty Diversity and Retention: A Pilot Program for New Faculty , 2005 .

[18]  Ann L. Brown,et al.  How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. , 1999 .

[19]  A. Ries,et al.  Retention of Junior Faculty in Academic Medicine at the University of California, San Diego , 2009, Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges.

[20]  Maura Borrego,et al.  Diffusion of Engineering Education Innovations: A Survey of Awareness and Adoption Rates in U.S. Engineering Departments , 2010 .

[21]  Daniel L. Schwartz,et al.  Chapter 3: Rethinking Transfer: A Simple Proposal With Multiple Implications , 1999 .

[22]  Robert McDonald,et al.  Motivation to pursue surgical subspecialty training: is there a gender difference? , 2007, Journal of the American College of Surgeons.

[23]  Neil R. Smalheiser,et al.  Author name disambiguation , 2009, Annu. Rev. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[24]  Carl Lagoze,et al.  Resolving author name homonymy to improve resolution of structures in co-author networks , 2011, JCDL '11.

[25]  Geoff Potvin,et al.  Motivation toward a Graduate Career in the Physical Sciences: Gender Differences and the Impact on Science Career Productivity , 2012 .

[26]  Maura Borrego,et al.  Expanding global engineering education research collaboration , 2008 .

[27]  James F. Ragan,et al.  Does Raiding Explain the Negative Returns to Faculty Seniority? , 2009 .

[28]  Vladimir I. Levenshtein,et al.  Binary codes capable of correcting deletions, insertions, and reversals , 1965 .