Q. How are articles screened and selected?
A. The original set of articles were culled from chapters 14, 15, 16, and 17 of a draft of John Heywood's (2005) Engineering Education: Research and Development in Curriculum and Instruction as well as from relevant subsections of other relevant chapters and from citations in a subset of National Science Foundation (NSF) Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Talent Expansion Program (STEP) proposals funded in or before 2004 that were voluntarily provided to us. Primary source citations (e.g., articles and conference proceeding) were separated from secondary source citations (e.g., books, book chapters, dissertations), and only primary source material was considered for inclusion in the database. This resulted in a pool of over 400 articles, of which approximately 150 were accepted into the database. (See inclusion and exclusion criteria)
Prior to opening the database to articles nominated by the field, the Center for the Advancement of Scholarship on Engineering Education (CASEE) expanded the article search space to pre-January 2005 articles that appeared online in February - March 2005 in more than 15 engineering education journals on a list maintained by Engineering Subject Center for the United Kingdom's Higher Education Academy.