25 years of frontiers educational research: the call for action-oriented research
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the first FIE conference a quarter of a century ago (1970), engineering educational research at Purdue has shifted from status quo oriented research to action oriented research. Earlier our emphasis was on providing information, examining relationships, identifying strengths and delineating problems. We analyzed the correlation of high school grades and test scores with college GPA. We documented trends in enrolment, grades, and retention. We surveyed students and graduates regarding the quality and relevance of their education. Sometimes we even defined areas requiring action. However after the first FIE Conference 25 years ago, our research efforts shifted to action oriented research. How could we use educational research information to change and improve engineering education? We describe action oriented research that has significantly improved placement in beginning courses, helped students make more informed career decisions, increased and retained more women and minority students, and enhanced our programs for honors and higher risk students. We also describe how we have extended our educational research efforts beyond our own campus and are sharing our educational research findings and action oriented programs with other institutional settings and colleagues all over the world. We also speculate on what direction institutional and collaborative engineering educational research is likely to take during the next quarter of a century.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".