Search for: All records

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. 

The purpose of this work was to test the inter-rater reliability (IRR) of a rubric used to grade technical reports in a senior-level chemical engineering laboratory course that has multiple instructors that grade deliverables. The rubric consisted of fifteen constructs that provided students detailed guidance on instructor expectations with respect to the report sections, formatting and technical writing aspects such as audience, context and purpose. Four student reports from previous years were scored using the rubric, and IRR was assessed using a two-way mixed, consistency, average-measures intraclass correlation (ICC) for each construct. Then, the instructors met as a group to discuss their scoring and reasoning. Multiple revisions were made to the rubric based on instructor feedback and constructs rated by ICC as poor. When fair or poor constructs were combined, the ICCs improved. In addition, the overall score construct continued to be rated as excellent, indicating that while different instructors may have variation at the individual construct level, they evaluate the overall quality of the report consistently. A key learning from this process was the importance of the instructor discussion around their reasoning for the scores and the importance of an ‘instructor orientation’ involving discussion and practice using the rubrics in the case of multiple instructors or a change in instructors. The developed rubric has the potential for broad applicability to engineering laboratory courses with technical writing components and could be adapted for alternative styles of technical writing genre.