Jenni Case

About

Dr. Jennifer Case is a Professor and Head of the Department of Engineering Education in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech. She has been researching student learning in higher education for over two decades, with a focus on engineering education. Her work explores teaching approaches that foster good learning outcomes, engineering curriculum structures that build necessary knowledge and dispositions for the workplace, and education research methodologies, including the use of sociological perspectives alongside cognitive psychology. Prior to her current role, she was a Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, where she also held an honorary appointment. She was a pioneer in the field of Engineering Education Research, beginning her scholarship in the mid-1990s amidst post-apartheid transformations in South Africa's engineering education system. Her research is grounded in practically-oriented curriculum reform, drawing on higher education studies to advance learning outcomes in engineering programs. She has developed a strong international reputation in engineering education, with extensive publications and leadership roles, including serving as a joint editor-in-chief for the top international journal Higher Education. Her career includes 21 years at the University of Cape Town, where she taught in the undergraduate Chemical Engineering program, led program administration, and contributed to curriculum…

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Engineering
• Social Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Natural Language Processing
• Anthropology
• Psychology
• Cartography

Selected publications

• Advancing Qualitative Analysis: An Exploration of the Potential of Generative AI and NLP in Thematic Coding

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023 · 49 citations

  PublisherDOI

• Understanding higher education: Alternative perspectives

  Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning · 2022 · 33 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Boughey, C. & McKenna, S. 2021. Book title: Understanding higher education: Alternative perspectives. Cape Town: African Minds.

  DOI

• Productive tensions? Analyzing the arguments made about the field of engineering education research

  Journal of Engineering Education · 2021 · 22 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Abstract Background A body of literature has arisen analyzing and legitimating the emerging field of engineering education research (EER). Using concepts from the sociology of knowledge, EER can be described as a region because it has relationships both to other academic fields and to its field of practice. Of interest is the strength of boundaries between these fields, described by the sociologist Bernstein's concept of classification. Purpose/Hypothesis This study addresses the research questi…

  DOI

• Building capacity in engineering education research through collaborative secondary data analysis

  Australasian journal of engineering education · 2023-01-02 · 11 citations

  articleOpen access

  This paper proposes the use of collaborative secondary data analysis (SDA) as a tool for building capacity in engineering education research. We first characterise the value of collaborative SDA as a tool to help emerging researchers develop skills in qualitative data analysis. We then describe an ongoing collaboration that involves a series of workshops as well as two pilot projects that seek to develop and test frameworks and practices for SDA in engineering education research. We identify eme…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Engineering culture under stress: A comparative case study of undergraduate mechanical engineering student experiences

  Journal of Engineering Education · 2024-04-01 · 10 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Background Engineering culture research to date has described the culture as rigid, chilly, and posing many barriers to entry. However, the COVID‐19 pandemic provided an important opportunity to explore how engineering culture responds to a major disruption. Purpose The purposes of this study are to understand how elements of engineering culture emerged in mechanical engineering students' perceptions of their classroom experiences during the pandemic and how their experiences varied acr…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Holly Matusovich

  Virginia Tech

  76 shared

• Rachel Kajfez

  The Ohio State University

  75 shared

• Marie Paretti

  George Washington University

  36 shared

• David Delaine

  33 shared

• Lisa Benson

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  33 shared

• Shawn Jordan

  Arizona State University

  33 shared

• Delia Marshall

  University of the Western Cape

  28 shared

• Nicole Pitterson

  Virginia Tech

  24 shared

Labs

• Engineering EducationPI

Awards & honors

• President’s Award from the National Research Foundation (NRF…
• Distinguished Teachers’ Award, UCT, 2007
• Elected Member of the Academy of Sciences of South Africa (A…
• Excellence in Teaching & Learning Award, Higher Education Le…
• Meritorious Book Award, UCT, 2015

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