2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

There are a variety of urgent calls for institutional initiatives and actions to transform engineering education. For a transformational change to occur, the initiatives must alter the culture of the institutions (Eckel, Hill, and Green, 1998). In this work in progress, we detail the methods used to conduct a scoping literature review (ScR) concerning the current state of the literature surrounding institutional culture and transformational change in engineering education at institutions of higher learning in the United States. As institutional culture and transformational change are currently underexplored topics in the engineering education literature, we investigated the larger body of computer science and engineering literature in the United States. Once completed, this study aims to reveal the current trends, theories, and potential gaps in the literature regarding these topics.

Arksey and O’Malley’s methodology for conducting scoping reviews informed the development of our scoping review protocol, which similarly includes five stages: (1) identify the research questions, (2) identify relevant studies, (3) select relevant studies, (4) chart the data, and (5) collate, summarize, and report results (Arksey and O’Malley, 2005). University librarians who specialize in conducting systematic reviews aided in the refinement of this protocol. From the research question and aim of the study, three main inclusion criteria were created: (1) the literature must discuss both organizational culture and transformational change, (2) discussion of transformational change must describe the institution where the change happened, and (3) the literature must emphasize the agents of transformational change. Additional inclusion and exclusion criteria were created in collaboration with both the librarians and reviewers. These criteria guided the search for existing literature in the following online databases: Elsevier (Engineering Village – Compendex and Engineering Village – INSPEC), ProQuest (ERIC and Education Database), Scopus, and Web of Science. These six databases were selected as they often include publications relevant to the field of engineering education. After the search was conducted, the inclusion and exclusion criteria were turned into questions to inform a three-step screening process (title, abstract, and full text) used by reviewers to determine whether a publication was eligible for the study. Reviewers were assigned to review papers through Covidence, a cloud-based systematic literature review management platform. There are currently two primary reviewers and a third additional reviewer to resolve any conflicts or disagreements if they should arise. Before each review cycle, the inclusion and exclusion criteria are revisited, revised, and agreed upon by the three reviewers. This screening process is performed iteratively, allowing for critical reflection at each stage to drive the resulting findings by the reviewers in consultation with content matter experts.

We are currently conducting our first round of screening in the study selection (third stage) of the scoping review protocol. After the removal of duplicates, 999 publications were found by searching in the six selected databases. This number is expected to be further reduced with each step of the screening process. When this scoping review is complete, the resulting publication will contain an analysis of the literature and synthesis of our findings, and present the prominent themes, theories, and potential gaps in the literature. This publication is expected to unite disparate lines of research on institutional culture and transformational change, challenge the assumptions in the field, and change the way engineering education views transformational change.