Measurement of Characteristics of Engineering Students: What Has Been Done and What Needs to Be Done?

Students’ characteristics not only determine their decision making in choosing college major, but also play a significant role in influencing their educational outcomes. Therefore, study of students’ characteristics has been one of the important topics in educational research across different subject disciplines. In the area of engineering education, a considerable amount of research effort has been spent on the measurement of the characteristics of engineering students. The measurement results have been applied to predict or explain students’ success or failure in engineering education. Characteristics contributing to better engineering education outcomes have been identified. However, different researchers have examined different characteristics of engineering students within the scopes of their own research interests, no universally agreed upon definition of engineering students’ characteristics exists in the current literature. In this paper, a comprehensive review and analysis of the existing research on the measurement of the characteristics of engineering students is presented. Specifically, attention has been given in addressing the following questions: 1). what characteristics of engineering students have been measured? 2). what research questions regarding the impact of students’ characteristics on their educational outcome have been answered? 3). what measurement and analysis methods have been applied? The author has also pointed out what is lacking in the current research and suggested potential future research directions in this area.