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A scoping review of methods used to analyze engineering curricula quantitatively with curricular analytics

Nahal Rashedi1, David Reeping1*, Siqing Wei2

1 Department of Engineering and Computing Education, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati 45221, Ohio, United States

2 Rayen School of Engineering, Youngstown State University, Youngstown 44555, Ohio, United States


Engineering Education Review 2026, 4(1),1-15; https://doi.org/10.54844/eer.2025.1110
Submitted05 Dec 2025
Revised22 Dec 2025
Accepted30 Jan 2026
Published20 Apr 2026
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Cite This Article
Abstract

This paper examines how engineering education scholars have employed quantitative metrics to analyze curricula. This work is situated within curricular analytics, an approach that employs network analysis to measure "curricular complexity" and its associations with outcomes, including retention and program quality. Since the introduction of this framework, researchers have proposed additional metrics to capture different dimensions of complexity. However, no effort has been made to consolidate these metrics in a single resource that highlights the suite of analytical options available to the community. To address this gap, we conducted a scoping review, beginning with foundational articles on curricular analytics and purposefully sampling papers that cited these works. Our guiding research question was: What metrics do researchers use to quantify the complexity of curricula? Of the 174 papers identified, 65 met our inclusion criteria after duplicates were removed. Through these studies, we identified 23 unique metrics, which we classified into structural and instructional complexity across three levels of analysis. We aim for this catalog of metrics to serve as a reference for the basics of curricular analytic metrics and as a practical tool to support curriculum design and optimization.

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Copyright: © by the authors. Licensee ISTS. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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