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ABSTRACT STS scholarship has produced important insights about relationships between the roles of peer review and the social construction of knowledge. Yet, barriers related to access have been a continual challenge for such work. This article overcomes some past access challenges and explores peer review normativities operating in the new discipline of Engineering Education. In doing so, it contributes new insights about disciplinary development, interdisciplinarity, and peer review as a site of knowledge construction. In particular, it draws attention to an aspect of peer review not previously discussed – how peer review normativities are shaped by disciplinary origins. A content analysis of peer review documentation revealed that a hyperfocus on methods, which can be traced back to disciplinary origins, continues to be a guiding normativity. However, interviews with editors revealed that they do not acknowledge that normativity. Implications of those findings and their misalignment are discussed, as are contrasts with the history of other disciplines. 

ABSTRACT CONTEXT The peer review process plays a critical role in ensuring the quality of work published within a field and advancing the knowledge within the research community. However, for many members of the community, the process of peer review largely remains a black box to many scholars, especially those with less experience within the community. Therefore, there is a need to illuminate the peer review process for the research community. PURPOSE OR GOAL To more transparently reveal the contents of the black box around the peer review process, we interviewed editors (associate and deputy editors) for the Journal of Engineering Education (JEE) to provide editor perspectives on the overall peer review process. The goal of this paper is to clearly articulate the behind-the-scenes processes of peer review as well as the expectations and perceptions of the editors with respect to publishing within JEE. By bringing these processes to light, we hope that more members of the field will be aware of the overall process and the associated expectations for contributing to the field. APPROACH OR METHODOLOGY/METHODS To meet the goals of this study, we conducted semi-structured interviews with six editors of JEE who worked in the field of engineering education research (EER), as a part of a larger project exploring the boundaries of the field as expressed within the peer reviews process. The interviewer from the research team followed a protocol but also asked additional questions to elicit more details in some cases. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, and thematically coded using an open-coding process. ACTUAL OR ANTICIPATED OUTCOMES Based on the analysis of the editor interviews, we present three critical aspects of the peer review process: the types of editors, the process that editors typically conduct to identify reviewers, and the types of decisions through the process. Additionally, we highlight considerations and advice from the editors to help members of the EER community develop. CONCLUSIONS/RECOMMENDATIONS/SUMMARY The current study makes the editors’ perspectives and decision-making processes more explicit to readers. These decision-making processes are full of careful considerations and also challenges. By doing so, we hope to help the members of the EER community gain a better understanding of what is going on backstage of the peer review process. 

The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of a set of scales intended to measure self-efficacy and mindset relating to advanced manufacturing. The scales were developed as part of a larger National Science Foundation funded project intended to create a set of online course and modules about advanced manufacturing. These courses and modules are intended to be completed by a variety of learners, including community-college students, 4-year university students, industry professionals, and informal learners who are looking to advance their skills. The scales will ultimately be used as measures to gauge the impact of the instructional activities being created as part of the NSF project. 

Engineering Education Research (EER) is an emerging interdisciplinary field (Beddoes, 2014a; Jesiek, Newswander, & Borrego, 2009). Having emerged less than twenty years ago, the field’s boundaries and normativities are still shifting and being formed. Furthermore, EER is inherently interdisciplinary, drawing on theories and methods from other fields, including education, psychology, and anthropology, among others (Beddoes, 2014b). These characteristics - the age and interdisciplinary nature of the field - make EER a particularly interesting site for examining a discipline in the making. One process through which the field’s boundaries and normativities are being formed is peer review (Beddoes, 2011). Therefore, the overarching goal of this project is to identify the kinds of scholarship that are readily accepted into the field and the kinds that are not. Examining this boundary work can produce new insights into the social construction of knowledge in EER, as well as in other interdisciplinary fields. As a first step toward the overarching goal, this paper presents preliminary findings that address the question: What differences exist in the experiences, perceptions, and understandings of those who have submitted articles to the Journal of Engineering Education (JEE) within the past 5 years? 

This Work-In-Progress paper highlights the work being done as part of an on-going project to explore the field of Engineering Education Research (EER) through the perspective of the peer review process. The overarching objective of this project is to identify the kinds of scholarship readily accepted into the field of engineering education research through peer review processes, and the kinds that are not. By identifying what approaches, topics, theoretical frameworks, and methodologies are accepted and not accepted through the peer review process, the field can be more open to discussion of the advancement of EER. More broadly, identifying such boundary knowledge can facilitate new understanding of how the social construction of knowledge occurs in interdisciplinary fields beyond engineering education. As a first step toward these larger objectives, we review relevant literature and outline our participants as well as our analytic plan. 

Research communities often emphasize theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and topics that appeal to particular subgroups of scholars within the community. Therefore, one of the challenges associated with the peer review process is ensuring that innovative ideas are not rejected simply because they live outside the conventional paradigms of the community. Determining why manuscripts are rejected from premier outlets, which influence the norms of a field, can further our understanding of existing disciplinary boundaries and how to increase the diversity of perspectives and the participation of scholars with views outside the conventional paradigm in the community. However, much of the literature on disciplinary boundaries focuses on the reliability of reviewers themselves and published manuscripts. As such, this paper focuses on the experiences and perspectives of scholars who have submitted to but not published an article in the Journal of Engineering Education through in-depth, qualitative interviews.