2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering education is a fast-growing field and as research questions have become more intricate, there have been recent calls for more sophisticated quantitative methods in engineering education. Traditional quantitative research methods have been used for a long time in educational research, and these methods have been important in developing our understanding of how learning with engineering occurs. However, there has been advancement in new and advanced quantitative methods that allow researchers to conduct a more nuanced analysis of student outcomes. In particular, methods for conducting person-centered analyses and analyzing large and nested data sets have become more pervasive in educational research. In this paper, we present a systematic review of publications in the Journal of Engineering Education (JEE) over the past eleven years. Specifically, we examined which quantitative methods are used to develop a picture of the state of quantitative methods in engineering education. The review categorizes the quantitative methods used in a total of 302 papers published in JEE from 2012 to 2022. The results found that while a large number of studies used basic statistical testing, there is a trend of more advanced quantitative methods being used over the years.