2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Cooperative education experiences or coops have been promoted as a work integrated learning experience and high impact practice in engineering education (ASEE NAE, 2018). Coops have been seen as a way to bridge engineering coursework and practice, or in other words bridge theory to practice for engineering students. In alignment with these calls for an increase in cooperative and experiential learning, the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE), established the Cooperative and Experiential Education Division (CEED). While there have been several major NSF grants focused on cooperative education and a number of engineering programs with mandatory cooperative education requirements there is still work to be done to connect research efforts to practice.

Due to continued calls for coops in engineering and their prevalence in engineering education research and practice, through a scoping review, this paper seeks to explore the literature on engineering cooperative education in the United States. More specifically, the purpose of this paper is to synthesize conference proceedings published by ASEE from 2000-2023 to explore trends and identify areas of growth.

In surveying the literature on cooperative education published in ASEE conferences, we identified three key findings and three areas of opportunity for future work. The first key finding was that 60% of the literature surveyed were descriptive papers that described a coop program design, coop course design, a specific coop course assignment, and/or a program evaluation. On the other hand, 40% of the published papers were research papers which were defined by studies with a stated methodology and framework, in alignment with best research practices. The most common frameworks used in these papers included Engineering Identity, Motivation Theory, and Self-Efficacy. The second key finding was that while a subset of the literature was focused on learning, the majority of these papers, with exception of a single paper, focused on the learning and development of professional skills. The third key finding was several time-based trends over time including a prevalence of work that discussed ABET between 2000-2010 as well as a more recent increase in work focused on virtual cooperative education and diversity, equity, and inclusion since 2020. After the analysis and results emerged, we identified three areas of opportunity for future descriptive and research papers in engineering education. These areas include exploring the acquisition of technical skills and engineering content knowledge, mental health and student well being, and equitable design and inclusive practices in cooperative education experiences. This paper contributes to the literature by synthesizing previously conducted research and providing recommendations for future research and practice to improve cooperative education in engineering education.