Research Areas and Funding Trends through NSF Funded Awards in Engineering Education between 2012 and 2022

This full research paper describes the research areas and funding trends through NSF funded awards in engineering education. Engineering Education Research (EER) has traditionally spanned fives main areas of research [1] including engineering learning mechanisms, engineering learning systems, engineering epistemologies, engineering assessment and engineering diversity and inclusiveness as written by the original author. However, in a recent online content analysis of the U.S. institutions that offer engineering education academic programs or serve as engineering education research centers and research groups, we found additional areas that are missing in research. These gaps were mapped between the existing research areas and the ones advertised on institutional websites. This study considered the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded awards from the Division of Engineering Education and Centers (EEC) publicly available on the website which listed about 752 projects with a starting date between 2012 and 2022. The list of these awards was extracted from the website on August 25, 2022. These awards were mapped onto five research areas to aid in identifying unexplored and underexplored research areas. The funded awards were divided into different categories based on the labelled titles of funded awards by NSF. Additionally, this study explored the universities/organizations that had the highest number of funded awards and the highest amount of funding within this timeframe. The findings suggest a dire need for research in epistemologies, learning mechanisms, and assessments in engineering education. It sheds light on the uneven distribution of funding trends in the field of engineering education. This exploratory study builds upon the significance of the research areas in EER and funding trends for different institutions in engineering education. The paper concludes with a call for the engineering education research community to discuss ways to incorporate more research in the gap areas, equitable funding, as well as consider the possibilities for future work in engineering education.