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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. 

Despite the well-established importance of written communication skills for students in STEM disciplines, the quantitative assessment of STEM writing remains an evolving field. The present work seeks to measure the effectiveness of “generic” writing center tutors on the technical writing skills of senior-level Mechanical Engineering Technology students. A set of nineteen student analysis reports selected from a capstone design course were used as the source of the data. The reports were assessed both before and after a tutoring session using a version of the AAC&U VALUE rubric and a voice-development-style-diction method developed by the authors. By both methods, the improvements in student writing from before the tutoring session to afterwards were marginal at best, with some measures even showing a decrease in performance. The sole exception was that a significant increase in hedging, boosting, and attitude words appeared in the students’ work, indicative of a change in diction. It is concluded that an intervention by a “generically” trained writing center tutor has little effect on the quality of student writing outside of that due to the inclusion of additional adjectives. An intervention by tutors specifically trained using the WATTS methodology is proposed as a means to address this. Such an intervention will be investigated as an extension to the current work.