EAGER Collaborative Proposal: Building a Community of Mentors in Engineering Education Research Through Peer Review Training

This Early-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) project explores mentorship of researchers in reviewing engineering education research (EER) scholarship, leading to the development of training in peer review of journal manuscripts and grant proposals. As a field, EER benefits from diverse perspectives aimed at improving engineering education and challenging existing models of professional formation of engineers, but there is a need to formalize how scholars hone their own research and communication skills through reviewing.

We propose the EER Peer Review Training (EER PERT) program, leveraging the knowledge and organizational structure developed in the Journal of Engineering Education (JEE) Mentored Reviewer Program in which triads of mentees and mentors (experienced reviewers) collaboratively write timely, constructive reviews of JEE manuscripts. EER PERT participants include mentees, mentors, and mentor coaches.

Diverse participants will be selected through a competitive application process and recruitment through personal and professional networks, including HBCU and MSI networks. Coaches will monitor the quality of the mentoring relationships within mentor/mentee triads through periodic surveys and meetings, and will provide feedback to the project team. In parallel with developing and implementing this training, we will study how reviewers develop mental models of EER.

Ongoing studies about the peer review process have identified problems including lack of reviewer training, inconsistent and biased reviews, and dearth of qualified reviewers. Poor quality peer reviews can lead to poor quality scholarship; overly harsh, negative reviews can exclude diverse voices in the community and stifle innovation. We will leverage a training framework developed through the JEE Mentored Reviewer Program, in which participants have described positive outcomes of expanded expertise, a greater understanding of research quality, and shifting the dominant (negative) discourses about peer review to a more positive view of knowledge production and publishing.

Taking a sociocultural perspective that recognizes the role of social interaction in co-construction of knowledge and metacognition, we pose these research questions: How do scholars develop schema for quality engineering education research through collaboratively constructing peer reviews? What are the similarities and differences between schema development for manuscript and grant proposal review?The EER PERT program will enhance the quality of EER manuscripts and proposals, and ultimately increase the impact of scholarship in EER.

The positive feedback loop created through developing scholarship review skills within the EER community will maximize NSF investments in EER projects.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.