Exploring Engineering Graduate Student Research Proficiency with Student Surveys

The importance of the engineering graduate degree is increasingly being recognized by the professional engineering community. For instance, the National Academy of Engineering (2005) suggests that the typical engineering baccalaureate degree program cannot accommodate the academic development now required for professional engineers and that the master’s degree should be considered the first professional engineering degree. Students are also becoming more aware of the importance of the engineering graduate degree. Consequently, the number of applications to U.S. engineering graduate programs increased annually by an average of approximately 4 percent over the period 1997 to 2007 (Bell, 2008). The National Academies’ Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy (COSEPUP) (1995) considers the student research experience the essence of graduate engineering education. Research is a means by which graduate students—especially doctoral students—passionately immerse themselves into a specific field (Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, 2005). While the graduate research experience clearly is intended to prepare engineering students for research careers in academe, government, and industry, it also provides students with abilities, like analytical problem-solving, valued in non-research and even non-engineering careers (COSEPUP, 1995). Nettles and Millett (2006) note that educational studies to date have often neglected graduate engineering education, and hence those studies have often ignored the engineering graduate student research experience. Information about the quality of education engineering graduate students receive is mostly limited to measurements like the questionable U.S. News and World Report rankings (Vojak, Price, and Carnahan, 2003) that do not truly assess the development or outcomes of students and a few studies giving signs that room for improvement exists in graduate engineering education. These studies include one conducted by the National Science Foundation (Hoffer and Welch, 2006) finding that the median time-to-degree for U.S. engineering Ph.D. graduates is increasing and another conducted by the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) (2007) estimating a formidable attrition rate of more than 25 percent for U.S. engineering Ph.D. programs. A longer time-todegree or a relatively high attrition rate can indicate that student research deficiencies may exist on a widespread basis (CGS, 1990; Lovitts, 2001), but these metrics are not conclusive evidence of research deficiency and do not give insight into the factors that may cause deficiencies. Studies in engineering education literature that explore engineering graduate student experiences give indications that students are experiencing educational deficiencies that can negatively affect the research experience, such as a lack of written and oral communication skill development (Pierson, 1997; Watkins and Green, 2003), issues of inadequate mentoring (Seixas, 2000; Vesilind, 2001), and obstacles in completing graduate study corresponding to certain underrepresented demographic groups (Reichert and Absher, 1998), but these studies did not investigate the research experience in an in-depth manner. Nettles and Millett (2006) did examine engineering Ph.D. student research outcomes, though only as part of a broad study of doctoral education across a wide variety of disciplines. In short, there is nearly an absence of studies that explicitly and thoroughly explore the student research experience in graduate engineering education. Exploring Engineering Graduate Student Research Proficiency with Student Surveys