Special issue on systematic reviews and meta-analyses in engineering education: Highlights and future research directions

It gives me great pleasure to explore and synthesize the unique and synergistic contributions of 14 articles for this important special issue, as well as to set future directions for the field of engineering education. Given that evidence-based syntheses help shape key research advances in the medical, psychological, and educational fields, we sought papers that used state-of-the-art methods for systematic reviews and meta-analyses to explore fundamental topics in engineering education. We received many excellent manuscripts, and eventually accepted 14 for this special issue. They cover a range of topics, including reading and writing in engineering, the use of concept maps for assessment in engineering, and other key topics. Most papers used systematic review methods, while three used scoping reviews and bibliometric methods. However, none used meta-analysis. Although this is surprising, it presents an opportunity to call for more rigorous experimental and quantitative research on key topics in engineering education. Experimental studies can uncover cause and effect relationships and enable researchers to draw inferences more easily. While I advocate for all traditions of rigorous research, the collection of reviews in this special issue points to a pressing need for more experimental studies in the field of engineering education.