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The ability to communicate technical information in written, graphical, and verbal formats is an essential durable skill for engineering students to develop as undergraduates and carry forward into the workplace. The importance of technical communication skills is emphasized in the core ABET outcome “3. an ability to communicate effectively with a range of audiences.” Undergraduate engineering programs tend to adopt one of two strategies for technical writing instruction, either offering a stand-alone course that is frequently taught out-of-discipline or embedding technical communications skills within-discipline in laboratory or design classes. Despite these efforts, employers still report that novice engineers’ technical communications skills do not meet industry expectations. Prior work by our group attempted to address this skills gap through the design and implementation of a unique stand-alone technical communications course that was specifically created for first-year mechanical engineering students and centered on multiple, industry-aligned modalities of communication. Preliminary evaluation of this new curriculum showed that students demonstrated substantive gains in self-efficacy for nearly all technical communication skills covered in the course, including synthesis of background research, graphical representation of data, basic statistical analyses, and composition of technical reports and presentations in a variety of formats. In this paper, we will extend our prior work by examining whether the skills emphasized in this stand-alone first year course are transferred into later courses within the discipline. Specifically, we will focus on three core skill sets: (1) writing clear, concise, and coherent technical narratives; (2) graphical representation of quantitative and qualitative data sets; and (3) basic statistical analyses, including linear regressions, one-way ANOVA, and propagation of error. We will follow a single cohort of mechanical engineering students (n=147), beginning with the stand-alone technical communications course taken in the spring of their freshmen year, through their two subsequent semesters of coursework involving discipline-specific design and laboratory-based courses. For two semesters, post-course surveys will be administered to students that assess self-efficacy for the three core skill sets as well as their perceptions of the value and applicability of the first-year technical communications course in their current coursework. Also, written deliverables for a subset of students will be evaluated by faculty instructors according to established technical communications rubrics. The results of this study will be used to refine our first-year technical communications course and modify the strategies that we are using in later lab and design courses to activate prior technical communications knowledge (e.g., review exercises, exemplars, and common rubrics). More broadly, our approach to developing and reinforcing industry-aligned technical communications skills throughout our undergraduate curriculum may be of interest to other programs seeking to improve student outcomes in this area.
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Understanding the Skills and Knowledge Emphasized in Undergraduate Industrial Engineering Courses
A strong understanding of technical knowledge is necessary for all engineers, but understanding the context in which engineering work takes place is just as important. Engineering work impacts people, communities, and environments, and there is increasing recognition of the importance of preparing engineers to account for these sociocultural dimensions. The engineering curriculum needs to include both technical and sociocultural topics to prepare students as holistically competent engineers. A call for broader engineering skills is evident in ABET student outcomes, a few of which directly denote the importance of students’ ability to identify the ethical, cultural, and social impact engineers have on society. However, engineering education continues to underemphasize or omit entirely non-technical aspects of engineering practice. Technical knowledge persists as the central focus in engineering classes. Omitting sociocultural material in engineering classes can result in the development of future engineers whose designs further perpetuate social and systemic inequities, such as environmental pollution that affects vulnerable populations or inefficient designs that risk human lives. Additionally, emphasizing sociotechnical content in undergraduate engineering courses can help attract and retain a more diverse population of students who value socially relevant engineering work. A deep grounding in both technical and social skills and knowledge is particularly important in Industrial Engineering (IE), a field that focuses on analyzing data to improve systems and processes and which tends to focus more on human and business dimensions than many other engineering fields. Even so, there is little evidence to indicate that sociocultural skills and knowledge are taught in IE courses. Because the curricular focus of a field communicates to students what is and is not valued in the field, students who enter IE with a strong desire to advance social good may learn that such a goal is inconsistent with the field’s values and ultimately feel alienated or disinterested if social dimensions are not incorporated into their coursework. More insight is needed into the kinds of messages IE coursework sends about the nature of work in the field and the opportunities these courses provide for students to develop the sociotechnical knowledge and skills that are increasingly crucial in Industrial Engineering. In an effort to characterize how, if at all, core courses in IE facilitate students’ development of sociotechnical engineering skills, this research paper examines the general content of core IE courses at a predominantly white institution. This paper draws on data generated for a larger research study that leverages Holland et al.’s Figured Worlds framework to explore the messaging undergraduate engineering students receive in their classes around valued knowledge in their field. In this study, we draw on observation data leveraging recordings of seven required undergraduate courses in IE. We analyzed three randomly selected sessions from each course, with a total of 21 unique sessions observed. Our findings describe the practices that are and are not emphasized within and across required IE courses and the ways these practices are discussed. Our characterization of emphasized engineering practices provides an important foundation for understanding what is communicated to students about the nature of engineering work in their field, messaging which has substantial implications for the population of students who enter and persist in the field beyond their undergraduate studies.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2054823
- PAR ID:
- 10543999
- Publisher / Repository:
- ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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