Guest Editorial: A Practical Approach to Understanding - and Applying! - the Scholarship of Application

A S MANY as 80% of papers published by the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EDUCATION fall within an area known as the scholarship of application [1].1 Recently, the TRANSACTIONS established a new set of criteria to evaluate manuscripts submitted in this area. This guest editorial is intended to demystify these new criteria and to help writers avoid some common mistakes. The guidelines given here suggest systematic ways for researchers to design their studies and present their findings that will increase the likelihood of their papers being accepted by the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EDUCATION. The TRANSACTIONS’ “Description and Review Criteria” describe the scholarship of application as follows: Scholarship of Application: “Contributions within this area of scholarship will often describe how prior research on learning and teaching (either general research, or research in a specific knowledge domain such as engineering) has been applied to create or design educational activities in electrical engineering (EE), computer engineering (CpE), and other fields within the scope of interest of IEEE. These activities include, but are not limited to, courses, course segments, curricula, laboratory experiments, course projects, capstone courses, and outreach activities. Faculty members across the world design these activities for their students, but to be published in the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EDUCATION a paper describing this work must (a) demonstrate application of published educational research and (b) provide a cogently articulated rationale for key design decisions” [2]. One way to think about this is that, much as all other forms of scholarship, the scholarship of application often means making a claim, laying out a hypothesis, or setting out a goal to be evaluated. Frequently, the assertion that the application is effective at achieving its stated goals is implicit (although it is better tomake this claim explicit). Specific examples of the scholarship of application and their associated claims, taken from recent IEEE