2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Background: Research methods are crucial for transparency and understanding of our research. However, engineering education research methods sections tend to report out obvious and perfunctory details and leave out the true processes of inquiry and discovery.

Purpose: This methods paper hopes to motivate the writing of more meaningful methods sections for transparency and insight into methodological process.

Method: With a focus on qualitative methodologies, we overview typical practices for writing methods sections in engineering education research, compare the content that is most useful and meaningful to understanding process, and use these comparisons motivate and illustrate framework for thinking about “honest” methods sections.

Findings: We find that typical engineering education qualitative research methods content includes: interview duration and modality, giftcard incentives, IRB approval, transcription, and coding procedure. These contents are standard and thorough, but do not tell how a study was conducted or how analytical questions were answered.

Instead, we propose methods topics to consider for an example interview study: theory’s influence on protocol and analysis procedures, participant rapport and transparency of study purpose, impact of researcher positionality, protocol development and rationale, semi-structured interview strategy (e.g., follow-ups), processes of member checking, any emerging or shifting analytical focus, operationalizing key terms for analysis, analytical process for answering research questions, and rationale for structuring the findings section. We find that these topics help provide a more vivid description of methodological process, enabling a study’s contextual understanding, reproducibility, educational capacity, and translational impact.

Significance: Research methods provide a crucial window our research. The more honest we are, the better we contextualize the knowledge we build and the better we are able to share and translate insights.