Practical implications in engineering education Who is supposed to do what?

In recent years, the engineering education community has invested significant energy and resources in the creation of a rigorous empirical knowledge base to support the transformation of engineering education practice. In this work, we address the specific question: When researchers identify practical implications in their research publications, what specific actions are they suggesting be done, and who is expected to take these actions? We answer this question by identifying "implication for action" sentences in a sample of sixteen articles across two issues of the Journal of Engineering Education. We find that the actions offered are infrequently cognitive (15% in our dataset) and frequently related to courses (83% in our dataset); and the identification of an actor happens just under half of the time (43% in our dataset). We discuss these results through a pragmatic perspective and a critical perspective.