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The Role of Replication in Engineering Education Research

Replication of research has gained increasing attention of late, as evidenced by recent editorials in a number of fields such as biomedical research (Begley & Ellis, 2012), economics (Burman, Reed, & Alm, 2010), nursing (Fahs, Morgan, & Kalman, 2003), and education (Spector, Johnson, & Young, 2014). Beyond academia, investors (“How Science Goes Wrong,” 2013) and funding agencies (“Can You Match This?,” 2015; Voosen, 2015) are discussing the role of replicability in funding decisions, and in some cases are taking steps to require that results of funded research are reproducible (Voosen, 2015). Although replication studies have their challenges, and replication is not a typical research approach in engineering education at this time, the Journal of Engineering Education’s Editorial Board would like to contribute to the conversation calling for more replication studies. Our goals in this editorial are to open a discussion of replication in engineering education research, to include the potential value of replication studies, and to situate replication in the context of other engineering education research quality criteria and considerations. Our discussion of replication studies is meant to include both of Schmidt’s (2009) categories: