An Analysis of the Engineering Education Research Base on Interventions

The PR²OVE-IT (peer reviewed research offering validation of effective and innovative teaching) website (www.pr2ove-it.org) is a database that summarizes the available research on educational interventions designed to enhance student learning, retention, and professional success. It is intended to be a tool for translating education research on interventions into practical classroom use by engineering faculty who are not engaged in educational research. The website is divided into two major categories for searching and viewing information about articles: interventions (instructional practices) and outcomes (the main result(s) of the study). The website provides three additional major categories for more refined searching: subject/content area (content or context of the learning environment), study characteristics (basic information about each study), and evaluation (method by which the intervention was assessed). This paper presents the results of an analysis of the 367 articles that were in the database on March 17, 2006