Emotions in Engineering Education: A systemic Literature Review

This paper reports on an integrative, systematic review of the research literature on emotions in engineering education. The purpose of the review was to critically assess the status of research and scholarship in the field, particularly focusing on how emotions and related phenomena have been conceptualized and how conceptualizations were used to frame and conduct research studies. The results show that a large part of the reviewed literature has not engaged extensively with the wide range of conceptualizations of emotion available in the educational, psychological, and sociological literature. Further, in many publications, the focus on emotion seems to have been secondary and unintentional. More research adopting an intentional, a priori focus on emotions will be crucial in further developing the field. To do justice to complex emotional phenomena in teaching and learning, future research will also need to engage a broader range of conceptualizations of emotion and research methods.