Educational practice and educational research in engineering : partners, antagonists, or ships passing in the night?

For most of the twentieth century, engineering education research mainly consisted of using student satisfaction surveys and instructors’ impressions to assess the effectiveness of teaching methods, courses, and curricula. In the 1980s and 1990s, the emphasis shifted to less anecdotal methods involving statistical comparisons between experimental and control groups (Wankat, Felder, Smith, & Oreovicz, 2002). Starting early in the new millennium, a movement arose to make engineering education research more “rigorous” by using methods and philosophies drawn from the social sciences.