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ABET lists the ability to communicate in writing to both technical and non-technical audiences as a required outcome for baccalaureate engineering students [1]. From emails and memos to formal reports, the ability to communicate is vital to the engineering profession. This Work in Progress paper describes research being done as part of an NSF-funded project, Writing Assignment Tutor Training in STEM (WATTS). The method is designed to improve feedback writing tutors without technical backgrounds give to engineering students on technical reports. Students in engineering programs have few opportunities to develop their writing skills. Usually, composition courses are part of the general education curriculum. Students often see these courses as unrelated to their majors and careers [2]. Ideally, writing support should be integrated throughout a program. Since WATTs capitalizes on existing resources and requires only a modest amount of faculty time, it could enable engineering programs to provide additional writing support to students in multiple courses and provide a bridge for them to see the connection between writing concepts learned in composition courses and their technical reports. WATTS was developed in a junior-level circuit analysis course, where students were completing the same lab and writing individual reports. This paper focuses on a senior capstone course that utilizes concepts taught in previous courses to prepare students to complete an independent team research or design project. Projects are unique, usually based on the needs of an industrial sponsor, and are completed over three consecutive semesters. Each semester, teams write a report based on their activities during that semester, with a comprehensive report in the final semester. The multi-semester nature of the senior design project provides an opportunity for the researchers to chart longitudinal changes from the first to the students’ third semester interactions with the writing tutors, assessing the value of an integrated approach. The program’s impact on students’ attitudes toward revision and the value of tutoring, as well as the impact on tutors, are part of the assessment plan. The program hopes to change the students’ focus from simply presenting their results to communicating them. The goals of the project are to demonstrate to students that revision is essential to the writing process and that feedback can improve their written communication abilities. The expectation is that after graduation they will continue to seek critical feedback as part of their career growth. Surveys given to both students and tutors revealed that the sessions were taken seriously by the students and that meaningful collaboration was achieved between them. An evaluation of the writing in pre-tutored to final submitted report shows statistically significant improvement. Preliminary and current results will be included within the paper. [1] Criteria for Accrediting Engineering Technology Programs, ABET, Baltimore, MD., 2020, p.5, ETAC Criteria (abet.org) [2] Bergmann, L. S. and Zepernick, J., “Disciplinarity and Transfer: Students’ Perceptions of Learning to Write,” Writing Program Administration, 31, Fall/Winter 2007.
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Improving Technology Student Critical Thinking Skills Through Trained Writing Tutor Interactions
Senior capstone projects are usually funded by industrial sponsors that present a project which becomes the focus of the students’ efforts. However, all too often, students concentrate on the application of engineering concepts to the project before accurately identifying the true problem to be solved. The resulting designs address the project goals but ultimately fail to solve or sometime even exacerbate the underlying problem. This paper discusses the results of an investigation of an intervention with the potential to improve students’ identification of the optimal designs to the projects posed by sponsors. The intervention represents an extension of research funded by an I-USE NSF Collaborative grant to improve writing support for engineering students on their technical documents by the use of peer writing tutors from non-technical backgrounds, collaboratively trained by engineering faculty and writing tutor supervisors. The project, Writing Assignment Tutor Training in STEM (WATTS), has been conducted in three universities over three years and has demonstrated statistically significant improvement in STEM undergraduate writing after students received tutoring from WATTS-trained tutors. At the beginning of a WATTS tutoring session, students provide an elevator speech to the tutors, summarizing the content of their reports. The researchers hypothesize that the tutors, as a general audience, are more likely to see the problem from a broader perspective than the students working alone. Also, the students must explain the reasoning behind their identification of the problem. Both of these interactions have the potential to enable the students to improve their critical thinking skills in their discipline. WATTS training materials have been adapted to include this aspect of the content of students’ reports. This study is currently being conducted in the first semester of a two-semester mechanical engineering technology senior design course. Results and analysis will be included in the paper.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2013496
- PAR ID:
- 10565051
- Publisher / Repository:
- ASEE Conferences
- Date Published:
- ISSN:
- 2153-5965
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Portland, Oregon
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--47596
