Q. What are the criteria for including and excluding articles?
A. Inclusion criteria
Each article chosen for inclusion in the database must meet all five (5) of the following criteria:
- It has an educational intervention;
- The intervention is at the undergraduate level.
- The intervention is in a science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) field;
- It discusses an outcome; and
- The outcome is related to improved learning or performance, retention, or assessment.
Although we have classified all the articles accepted for inclusion as "research", this does not necessarily reflect their authors' intent. Indeed, many of the articles are descriptions of an innovation (intervention) in a course and provide outcomes derived from student course evaluations or faculty's anecdotal observations of student change/improvement. These articles represent the state of much of the engineering education literature at the time the initial set of articles for the database were screened (2004-2006).
Exclusion criteria
Articles excluded from the database do not to meet any one (1) of the following criteria:
- There is no intervention (e.g., pure description of course content or hardware or software);
- The intervention is not at the undergraduate level.
- The intervention does not take place in a STEM field;
- No outcome data, no matter how anecdotal, are provided; or
- The outcome data are limited to student satisfaction with the intervention.
For a discussion of how the initial set of articles were selected and screened see article screening and selection.