Although isolated individual engineering faculty members had pursued engineering education research (EER) for as long as long as there has been formalized instruction in engineering, EER has made noteworthy progress as a critically important discipline, particularly within the United States, during the last fifteen years. In the United States much of this change was driven or supported by the shift, in 1996, by the engineering accreditation agency ABET to an outcomes focus. This change mandated measurement of student learning outcomes, and the need to assess student learning outcomes fostered a demand for the research findings of EER as well as broader faculty interest in the field. I recall being involved in early EER efforts when as a National Science Foundation (NSF) program officer I managed the award to Richard Felder of North Carolina State University for the first National Science Foundation grant (in 1991) to examine student learning styles. I later had the privilege of being one of the three program officers who recommended the 1993 grants to Cynthia J. Atman (University of Washington) and Martin Ramirez (then of Johns Hopkins) for the first NSF National Young Investigator awards to be made in engineering education research.

Since those first prominent NSF awards, the field has matured in terms of its topical focus and the quality of the research. Of particular note are the contributions and the intellectual integration of the work from the global community of researchers. The first International Conference on Research in Engineering Education (now called the Research in Engineering Education Symposium – REES) was held in 2007 in Honolulu, Hawaii, with fewer than 25% of the participants from outside North America. The most recent REES meeting in Madrid still had a strong minority of North American representatives but drew the majority of participants from throughout the global community of EER scholars.