ABSTRACT
Engineering education research (EER) as a field has seen considerable evolution in the past two decades. There has been a movement towards increased scholarly rigor, and in parallel with a broadening of the aims of engineering education, there has been considerable expansion in the constructs and phenomena which are the subjects of inquiry. This handbook contains 30 topical chapters which collectively capture discourse at the frontier of EER. This chapter serves as an overarching conclusion. For this chapter, a team of diverse authors – in terms of geography, career stage, and EER interest – joined hands. Following a review of the topical chapters, this concluding chapter presents the authors’ collective reflections centered on a view towards a future for engineering education research. In discussing the complexity that exists within EER, including interactions between stakeholder levels, the aspiration to develop globally competent engineers, and the need to translate research practices and ideas into an applied context, the field is confronted, the authors argue, with the reality that EER can always be more. What, then, could EER become in the future, and what does the community want it to become?
