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This exploratory study focuses on the use of ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence (GAI) tool, by undergraduate engineering students in lab report writing in the major. Literature addressing the impact of ChatGPT and AI on student writing suggests that such technologies can both support and limit students' composing and learning processes. Acknowledging the history of writing with technologies and writing as technology, the development of GAI warrants attention to pedagogical and ethical implications in writing-intensive engineering classes. This pilot study investigates how the use of ChatGPT impacts students’ lab writing outcomes in terms of rhetorical knowledge, critical thinking and composing, knowledge of conventions, and writing processes. A group of undergraduate volunteers (n= 7) used ChatGPT to revise their original engineering lab reports written without using ChatGPT. A comparative study was conducted between original lab report samples and revisions by directly assessing students’ lab reports in gateway engineering lab courses. A focus group was conducted to learn their experiences and perspectives on ChatGPT in the context of engineering lab report writing. Implementing ChatGPT in the revision writing process could result in improving engineering students’ lab report quality due to students’ enhanced lab report genre understanding. At the same time, the use of ChatGPT also leads students to provide false claims, incorrect lab procedures, or extremely broad statements, which are not valued in the engineering lab report genre. 

This study focuses on the effectiveness of learning transfer-focused or transfer-focused lab report writing instructional modules on engineering undergraduates’ lab report writing in entry-level engineering laboratory courses. The modules are novel due to their shared language to describe and reinforce foundational writing terms used by the writing faculty and are ready for immediate use by engineering lab instructors. Three different universities, consisting of a polytechnical university, a liberal arts-anchored private university, and a branch campus of a research-one land grant university, participated. Student lab report samples from six various sophomore-level engineering courses were collected. For the control group, none of the participating lab instructors accessed the transfer-focused modules (academic years of 2019-2020 and 2020-2021); sixty-four control group lab report samples were collected (n = 64). In the academic year 2021-2022, the lab instructors had access to the transfer-focused modules via the web to be encouraged to update their lab instructions; the experimental group lab report samples were collected from forty-two students (n = 42). Using defined writing outcomes, a panel of engineering lab instructors assessed the participating students’ early (one of the first reports in the class) and late lab reports (written near the end of the course). The lab report assessment analysis indicates that only 30% of the control group students could write their early lab reports at a satisfactory level, while 60% of the experimental group students reached a satisfactory level in their early labs. For both early and late lab reports, the experimental group students outperformed most outcomes over the control group. The notably improved outcomes were related to audience awareness, data presentation, data analysis, and data interpretation. The transfer-focused lab report writing pedagogy enhanced engineering undergraduates’ ability to engage in critical thinking practices, including analysis, interpretation, and evaluation of their lab data/products. Additionally, students appeared to improve their awareness of a technical audience, expecting engineering language, styles, and conventions commonly shared by writers in engineering.