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A challenge instructors face is developing and accurately assessing technical communication skills to ensure students can apply and transfer the skills from the academic context into the context of engineering practice. By intentionally balancing teaching transferrable communication skills relevant to engineering practice and evaluating student understanding, engineering educators can foster competence and prepare students for the expectations of their professional careers. This study addresses two questions: (1) how can chemical engineering instructors reliably and consistently assess student communication skills, and (2) are instructor expectations aligned with those of practicing engineers? The use of well-designed rubrics is important for setting clear expectations for students, providing constructive feedback, and in team taught courses, grading consistently. This study discusses how a rubric for assessing technical communication skills in senior-level chemical engineering laboratory reports was validated and demonstrated reliability across five chemical engineering instructors. Additionally, five industry partners evaluated student reports for comparison to instructor rubric scores. Expectations and perceptions of the quality of student work align between instructors and practicing engineers, but practicing engineers prioritized safety and abstract clarity, while instructors prioritized the students’ abilities to interpret results and draw conclusions.
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Developing a Writing Rubric to Answer Research Questions (not for Grading!)
Industry leaders emphasize that engineering students' technical communication and writing skills must be improved. Despite various institutional efforts, which include technical communication courses or engineering design projects aimed at enhancing students’ communication abilities, many believe there has been only slow improvement in this area. There has also been a dearth of longitudinal studies that examine the development of engineering students’ technical communication competencies from undergraduate to industry. This paper aims to contribute to this area through the creation of a rubric that specifically examines the writing competencies and technical communication ability of engineering students. This paper is part of a larger, NSF-funded research study that examines the quality of students’ written and oral communication skills and seeks to understand their relationship to the students’ spatial abilities. First-year engineering students in their second semester at a large R1 Midwestern university were examined. Students were tasked with creating a written report responding to a set of questions that asked about their team-based engineering design project completed in their first semester. As this occurred months prior, this non-graded report became a reflection on their experience and innate abilities. While low stakes, it mimicked a more authentic writing experience students encounter in industry. Students' responses were examined collaboratively by an interdisciplinary team which created a rubric through an iterative process. This rubric was distributed to the interdisciplinary team and outside evaluators composed of individuals in industry and engineering faculty. An inter-rater reliability analysis was conducted to examine levels of agreement between the interdisciplinary team and outside evaluators, and implications of this inter-rater reliability score and the process of rubric application were documented. Results of this paper include details on the development of a rubric that examine students’ technical communication and writing skills. Traditional rubrics utilized by engineering faculty usually address an entire project for engineering students, which includes students' content knowledge, writing capabilities, and the requirements of the project. Such rubrics are often used to provide feedback to students and evaluation in the form of grades. The narrower focus of the rubric being developed here can provide insights into communication and writing competencies of engineering students. Scores secured through the use of this rubric will aid in the research study’s goal of finding correlations between engineering students’ communication skills and spatial abilities (assessed outside of this current effort). Spatial ability has been well-documented as an effective indicator of success in STEM, and interventions have been developed to support development in students with weaker spatial skills. 23, 24This has prompted this research to explore links between spatial skills and communication abilities, as validated spatial interventions may help improve communication abilities. These current results may also provide unique insights into first-year engineering students’ writing competencies when reporting on a more authentic (non-graded) engineering task. Such information may be useful in eventually shaping guidance of students’ communication instruction in hopes of better preparing them for industry; this is the focus of a planned future research study.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2235687
- PAR ID:
- 10522151
- Publisher / Repository:
- ASEE Peer
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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