Investigating The Development of Research Practices in the Engineering Curriculum

Research Paper Recommended citation: Goldsmith, R. J., & Kelly, A. (2025). Investigating The Development of Research Practices in the Engineering Curriculum. In Kangaslampi, R., Langie, G., Järvinen, H.-M., & Nagy, B. (Eds.), SEFI 53rd Annual Conference. European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI), Tampere, Finland. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17631374. This Conference Paper is brought to you for open access by the 53rd Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI) at Tampere University in Tampere, Finland. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License. INVESTIGATING THE DEVELOPMENT OF RESEARCH PRACTICES IN THE ENGINEERING CURRICULUM R.J. Goldsmitha 1 A. P. Kellyb a University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, Australia, 0000-0003-3546-8052 b University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, Australia, 000-0001-7425-6680 Conference Key Areas: Continuing education and life-long learning in engineering; Curriculum development and emerging curriculum models in engineering Keywords: Undergraduate engineering research practices; curriculum design; research communication; theory of practice architectures ABSTRACT Final year undergraduate engineering students are expected to undertake an independent research project as part of their honours or capstone. However, many undergraduate students are under-prepared for this final year project. Anecdotal observations by two researcher-practitioners indicated that biomedical engineering students demonstrated a greater familiarity with the research practices of their field of engineering. This study investigates what enables and constrains the development of the research culture and practices in the undergraduate biomedical engineering curriculum from the perspectives of biomedical engineering educators. The researchers used the theory of practice architectures as a methodological approach to analyse the practices of the educators, to uncover practices which may be ‘taken for granted’, and to see how these practices may support the development of students as novice researchers. Findings show that induction into a research community, curriculum design and the student experience are key to the development of undergraduate students as researchers. Further research into the development of research practices in other fields of engineering is planned, as well as exploring the student perspectives of participation in the biomedical engineering research community. 1 R. J. Goldsmith [email protected] 1 INTRODUCTION The engineering degree programs that the authors teach into at an Australian university are characterised as embedded honours programs, but, as with writing practices in the engineering curriculum (Goldsmith, Willey & Boud, 2019; Kranov, 2009), the development of research practices of the engineering disciplines seems to be invisible. It is difficult to see where research practices are introduced in the early years of the undergraduate engineering curriculum. Some engineering faculties may offer a research methods unit of study or training module in the final year of undergraduate study, but it is difficult to see how common this is in engineering curricula (e.g. Jin et al., 2023; Wallin, Adawi & Gold, 2017). Furthermore, the authors’ observations as supervisors of students undertaking capstones, and as facilitators of workshops assisting students to develop their research proposals, are that students embark on their capstones with widely varying prior education in understanding of generic stages of conducting research, research methodologies and methods, and research communication practices. For example, researcher b coordinates a research preparation subject for undergraduate engineering students. When asked if they have read a literature review fewer than 5% of a cohort of over 600 students answered ‘yes’. It became apparent that they had read literature reviews, but they did not realise the function of a literature review. This example is presented to the reader as indexical of students’ understanding of broader research practices. The authors noticed that biomedical engineering students tended to come to their capstones better prepared and were able to talk more confidently about their understanding of research practices. The biomedical engineering curriculum was therefore identified as a site of ‘good practice’, and worth exploring. Our research investigates the arrangements and practices within this site of practice. We will then conduct similar investigations with other schools of engineering in the faculty of engineering at University X, to see what can be learned about how to support undergraduate engineering students to develop the research practices required of them to meet graduate and employer expectations (e.g. Australian Qualification Framework, 2013; Engineers Australia, 2018). Research into engineering undergraduate curricula generally focuses on pedagogy and assessments (e.g., Palmer, 2004; French et al., 2015; Hammer et al., 2018; Knudson et al., 2019; Lawson et al., 2015; Lee & Loton, 2019, Willey et al., 2008; Williams & Trevelyan, 2022). There is also a focus on how to implement change in engineering curricula (e.g. Brink et al. 2020). When researchers do investigate the capstone project, the focus tends to be on the transition from university to work. There is less emphasis on the curriculum design that underlies the capstone project, and the research practices that are assumed to be developed in the undertaking of the project. At University X, as with other Australian universities, the capstone project is part of an embedded honours degree in Engineering which meets the Washington Accord requirement WA4 for professional engineer (IEG, 214, p. 15). The Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) level 8 Honours degree (AQF, 2013) likewise requires a focus on these curricula elements. Our investigation maps key touchpoints of research cultures as they appear in the biomedical engineering curriculum. Our overarching research questions are: 1. What are the research cultures and practices within the biomedical engineering curriculum and how are they evidenced? 2. What constrains and what enables the development of the research cultures and practices within the biomedical engineering curriculum? 3. What opportunities does this development provide to meet the learning needs of biomedical engineering students prior to embarking on the capstone program? In this paper, ‘subject’ refers to a ‘unit of study’ within a degree program. 2 METHODOLOGY 2.1 Theoretical Perspectives The methodology used in this project is underpinned by practice theory perspectives, specifically the theory of practice architectures. The theory of practice architectures (TPA) has been developed by Stephen Kemmis and colleagues (Kemmis, 2022; Kemmis et al., 2014; Mahon et al., 2017) to explore contexts such as educational policy and praxis, (e.g. Kemmis et al., 2014) and engineering education research (e.g. Gardner, Goldsmith & Vassalas, 2016; Goldsmith et al., 2023) among others. It seeks to investigate taken-for-granted practices and to enable researchers to see what is often hidden in plain sight. The theory takes a site-ontological approach, and each site of practice is bounded by arrangements (cultural-discursive, materialeconomic and social-political) that constrain and enable practices. These practices also interact with the arrangements in a dynamic interflow, so that the sayings, doings and relatings of the practices in the site of practice interact with the arrangements that enable and constrain those practices. The theory of practice architectures thus focuses on the practices rather than on the individual, particularly when considering a complex structure, such as an engineering curriculum. The theory of practice architectures allows the researcher to see the interplay between circumstances, resources, language, relationships, power and agency, so that an understanding of complexity can be arrived at without prescription. This perspective provides both a theoretical underpinning and a methodological approach to investigate how certain practices come about. It does this by prompting researchers to ask questions that ‘identify actual empirical connections between practices and arrangements’ (Mahon et al. 2017, p. 19), such as how practices are enacted and why, which practice architectures hold practices in place and how this happens. For example, in this study, we ask: what enables and constrains research practices in the undergraduate engineering curriculum? What are the conditions that enable research practices to flourish? Conversely, what are the conditions that may inhibit those research practices from flourishing? Using TPA as a methodological approach requires analysing a site of practice for the conditions which enable and constrain particular practices. The conditions are seen as arrangements: culturaldiscursive, material-economic, and social-political, which pre-figure the practices within the site. The practices are referred to as sayings, doings, and relatings. For example, in the current study, the arrangements of the three subjects enable students to use the language of research (make a hypothesis), undertake research in laboratories, and relate to one another in research groups (for a more detailed understanding of the theory of practice architectures, see e.g. Kemmis and EdwardsGroves, 2018). 2.2 Participants and Data Collection Approval to conduct this study was granted by the university human ethics committee, and all participants provided informed consent that their de-identified responses could be used, in accordance with the protocols of the university’s human ethics process. Data were collected through analysis of subject documents and through interviews with three engineering academics from the School of Biomedical Engineering at the university. Potential participants were identified in a preliminary meeting with the Head of School of Biomedical Engineering to discuss the research project. The Head of School provided the names of colleagues whom he considered to be undertaking innovative teaching practices in the undergraduate Biomedical engineering curriculum. The potential participants were then contacted by email and invited to participate in the research by consenting to be interviewed for between 4560 minutes. The interviews consisted of semi-structured questions (Appendix A) and a request to draw a diagram or sketch that represents the research practices that students develop in the participant's subject (central panel), the research practices that students are expected to learn in prior subjects within the School, and research practices that students would be expected to develop in subsequent subjects. The interviews with the engineering academics were audio-recorded via online meeting platforms, with one researcher in the same room as the participant while the other researcher was in the online meeting. While the number of interviews was only three, the authors found that "the systematic study of fewer persons, rarer experiences, and less repeatable conditions" (Slaton & Pawley, 2018, p. 136) focused this study on rarer engineering educational practices. Transcription of the interviews was originally done using Teams or Zoom, depending on which online meeting platform was used for the interviews. At this point, the interviews were de-identified, and each participant was assigned a pseudonym (Interviewees A, B, C). A = coordinator of the introductory subject; B = coordinator of a 2nd/3rd year subject; C = coordinator of a final year subject. The transcriptions were then ‘cleaned up’ by both researchers before a reflexive thematic analysis was undertaken (Braun & Clarke, 2022). Each researcher independently read and reread the responses, locating broad categories, listing terms/phrases that exemplified the categories, and identifying possible themes and examples of themes in the collated responses. Following this, the researchers coded the recurrent themes. The approach locates ‘thematic patterns of shared meaning’ (Braun & Clarke, 2020, p.18). The two researchers then critically compared and discussed findings until agreement on the final analysis was reached. This paper focuses on three of the key themes that were identified, and which are listed in Table 1 in the results section. The diagrams drawn by the participants have been analysed for textual information but not yet for any additional insights that might be gained from the visual representations they contain. 3 RESULTS Several terms, words and phrases were identified as representative of three main themes which are presented in table 1. Quotes have been provided that are representative of the key themes. Theme Term/word/phrase Representative quote Research practices Critical thinking; communication skills: oral presentation & written report; teamwork; mentoring; synthesising information; lab skills; literature search; research literacies; making a hypothesis group work so you know which of course in any research practices key to be working as groups. And you know the communications within groups are fundamental to success[C]; literature review, research, question, writing up the experiments, coming up with that timeline, do the experiments and communicate the findings right [B] Subject design institutional arrangements, designer agency/ autonomy, cohort, class sizes, authentic assessment, hands on, meaningful context What they really like, what the students like about this subject and have the ability of applying the knowledge that they learn in the webinar, in the laboratory, which is the second part of the subject [B] Student experience transition and belonging, collaboration and selfmanagement, groupwork because it's the first-year subject there are challenges about creating a sense of belonging and creating a sense of transition in the student [A]; then we effectively hand over to the groups to run their projects’[C] Table 1. Key themes identified in the thematic analysis 3.1 Research Practices The interviewers did not define ‘research practices’ to avoid imposing the researchers’ own perspectives on the participants in the study, but this term was used in the third question in the interview protocol. This ‘inductive’ approach elicited from interview participants their understandings of research practices. There was marked consistency among the interview participants in their understanding of the research practices that were being taught. What is significant from a TPA perspective is that these are not explicit in curricula documents but are taken for granted, or as is noted elsewhere, ‘invisible’ (Jin et al., 2023). 3.2 Subject Design Amongst the institutional arrangements of the subject design are the enablements and constraints of the Biomedical Engineering cohort, including the size of the cohort, often a blend of undergraduate and postgraduate students, due to resource limitations, such as limited availability of specialist teaching staff for certain subjects. As observed by all the interviewees, undergraduate enrolments have continued to increase since the Biomedical engineering degree commenced in 2018, and this has necessarily impacted class sizes, ratio of teachers to students, teaching activities and types of assessment tasks. Currently, the later year subject, taught by Interviewee C as a studio, has a cohort size of approximately 30 students. There are weekly meetings with students in their research groups, where the tutors act as research supervisors. Interviewee C commented that: ‘So small classes probably lead to better teaching outcomes’, while also saying that with larger numbers of students coming into the subject, the teaching staff will ‘have to find, you know, solutions to do that in a more, you know I guess practical way, because it's - we can't just keep scaling it longer and longer and longer, you know. Gotta fit it in in the program’. Material-economic arrangements of smaller class sizes enable research practices such as research meetings and tutors acting as research supervisors, while an imminent increase in student numbers may constrain such practices. 3.3 Student Experience The cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements in the student experience, as reported by the interviewees, support students to become novice researchers, as illustrated by the following comments: So as a group they start from week one on choosing the medical problem, reading the literature, understanding what is the current need in the literature searches and then under our guidance, they decide on what they can actually do in the laboratory [B] In Interviewee B’s subject, the focus is on ‘understanding and applying the concepts around the use of biomedical polymers’ [B], with an emphasis on lab work in a group-based approach. Students are provided with some autonomy in choosing a project and are expected to work with the other members of their group to develop a hypothesis and perform experiments. In Interviewee C’s subject, students choose from a range of projects which focus on single cell RNA sequencing, form teams and then are provided with guidance (‘just like in a research environment’) to conduct research and present their findings at the end of the semester: They’ll meet problems and they'll like, you know, work together to jump those hurdles and then come to us. Ask the right questions. Get the appropriate guidance, just like in a research environment and you have like a kind of supervisor or a research team [C]. 4 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS As noted earlier, the researchers did not provide the interviewees with a definition of research practices; instead, examples of research practices were provided by the interviewees in the course of the interviews. There was strong agreement in the research practice identified by all the interviewees. Critical thinking, literature search, communication skills and teamwork/groupwork were all seen as being core research practices. Groupwork was seen as both key to a successful research project and an area where students struggled. Interestingly, groupwork in Biomedical Engineering projects was also identified as an area of challenge in a previous study (O’Connell et al., 2021). Communication skills/practices, specifically, being able to communicate the results of their research, were noted by all the interviewees but were not identified as an area of struggle. The area of communication practices was expanded on by all the interviewees, in slightly different ways. [communicating with people in different disciplines/areas of expertise; oral presentations; written reports, with various tasks being collaborative or individual]. These practice architectures can be seen to enable a range of research practices in the biomedical engineering school. For example, sayings in communicating results, doings in laboratory work, and relatings in teamwork, are seen as fundamental by our interviewees. We have not witnessed this perspective in other fields of engineering education. From what can be seen in the analysis of the data, which consist of document analysis of subject outlines as well as the interviews, several factors interact to support the development of research practices in this School. Research is spoken of as part of the undergraduate experience; it is enacted in authentic research projects in several subjects from first to fourth year; and lecturers and tutors act as research supervisors. These arrangements can be adapted by other Schools, and may already exist, but what is striking about the site of practice in Biomedical Engineering at University X is the explicitness of the development of practices. As noted by Huet (2017) and Walling et al (2016), this emphasis on research-led approaches to undergraduate curricula considerably enhances the learning experiences and engagement of students. This study is limited by the small number of interviewees, who may not be representative of other practices and perspectives in the School of Biomedical engineering. While the context of this study was an Australian university, the findings speak to similar concerns in European studies (e.g. Huet, 2017; Wallin, Adawi & Gold, 2016). The sample size in this study was small: three coordinators of units or study. This renders these results preliminary, but indexical of further areas of inquiry. 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