Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011 - rees2009

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) Página 319 de 957
Optics and Photonics (ETOP) and Proceedings of the American Society of Engineering
Education (ASEE). ETOP is an international, biennial conference sponsored by the Optical
Society of America and SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering. The
conference draws a relatively small number of participants and on average 80 papers and
posters. American Society of Engineering Education is an interdisciplinary engineering
education conference and includes divisions focused on engineering physics, as well as
electrical and computer engineering that sometimes contain optics and photonics related
work. Several other divisions within the ASEE conference proceedings also include optics
and photonics education related publications. Both conference websites contain the
proceedings, which is where the papers for this study were collected. All ETOP
publications from the 2007 and 2009 conferences are included due to the expectation that
the papers are education and optics related. For ASEE proceedings the keywords listed in
table 1 were used to identify relevant papers. The keywords were selected to capture
publications with any content related to the field of optics and photonics. The only results
that were excluded from these keyword searches were papers that only included a
keyword in the author’s biographies. Our method, derived from Strauss and Corbin
(2008), included open coding to examine the papers for optics and photonics education
content and category development within the selected papers. The search identified 170
total articles and table 2 specifies the number of collected articles from the two
publication sources. Comparative analysis of the entire document was used to determine
which papers to include in the six engineering education categories that emerged: (1) lab
or experiments, (2) course design, (3) assessment, (4) programs or tracks in optics and
photonics, (5) K-12 education and outreach, and (6) teaching practices.
Table 1: Publication Sources and Search Terms
Table 2: Number of Articles Captured
In addition to the subject categories, we also examine the journals and conferences that
optics education researchers cite. After completion of citation reviews of the collected
papers, it was apparent that there is a limited opportunity to examine specific authors for
their influence, as there was little consistency in citations.
Proceedings of Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011
Madrid, 4 th - 7 th October 2011