More Than Just Lab Work: A Summer Intern Program Teaches Undergraduates How To Communicate Their Research

A number of North American universities offer summer programs which enable undergraduates from their home institutions and others to explore the world of engineering research. The Summer Undergraduate Research Intern program at Purdue University, a two-year-old program funded by NASA and NSF, was established to interest students in pursuing graduate work by simulating the professional activities of a research scientist. What distinguishes the SURI program from its counterparts elsewhere is systematic instruction in technical communication. The SURI developers embraced the complementary and necessary relationship between laboratory research and written and spoken communication skills by offering a weekly seminar in technical communication as part of the program. This professional seminar is conducted by an engineering communication specialist with help from an engineering librarian. This paper discusses the skills in library research, writing, and speaking needed by students to produce a review of the literature and to give a mock conference presentation based on their summer research. The paper also explores the challenges the seminar instructors faced in effectively delivering those skills to a linguistically and academically diverse group of engineering students. Introduction Over the past couple of decades, research experiences for undergraduates (REUs) have become an increasingly popular and effective way for engineering students to explore the world of research. These programs come in an array of choices of topic, location, program goals, enrollment, and duration. 1 Most of the papers published about REUs tend to discuss either research approaches, “how-to” run a program, or assessment. 2 Some programs assess their success based on future graduate school matriculation of their former students, or on the number of publications or conference papers for which these students are listed as co-authors. 3-6 That a publication record is considered a measure of success of REUs is external validation for the importance of communication skills for engineers. Nearly 50 years ago, the founder of the IEEE Professional Communication Society called clear speech and writing “...prime and necessary characteristics of the successful engineer.” 7 More recently, ABET 2000’s Criterion 3 (g) stated that “Engineering programs must demonstrate that their graduates have:...an ability to communicate effectively.” 8 Unlike the wide-angle view of many of the papers on REUs, in which communications and library activities often are mentioned in passing, this paper focuses in on how one relatively new REU program reinforces the message that the ability to communicate one’s research orally and in writing goes hand-in-hand with the research itself. P ge 10946.1 “Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education” Program Background The NASA Institute for Nanoelectronics and Computing at Purdue University established its Summer Undergraduate Research Internship (SURI) Program in the summer of 2003. The 18 students, representing nine different colleges and universities (including various departments at Purdue), joined ongoing interdisciplinary research teams consisting of professors and graduate students. The following summer, 23 students from 13 schools participated in the eight-week SURI program. The 2003 students represented five different majors; in 2004, there were eight majors. Information on the projects in which the students participated is on the SURI website 9 . Similar to many other REUs, the goals of the SURI program are to expose undergraduates to the professional lives of graduate students and research scientists. During their time on campus, the SURIs spend more than 40 hours per week attending professional development and research seminars; short courses and workshops; and working on their research projects. Technical Communication Seminar Recognizing the importance of communication skills for engineers, the SURI organizers decided to devote a weekly two-hour seminar to issues in technical communication, and asked me, the communications specialist for the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University, to lead it. In deciding what aspects of technical communication to teach, I let the program goals be my guide. While many REU students write technical or lab reports or prepare posters 10-13 , only a couple of programs assign a literature review 14, 15 . It seemed to me that the literature review and conference abstract are appropriate and authentic documents for students trying out the role of researcher because an academic’s professional reputation primarily rests on his or her success in publishing journal articles and presenting conference papers. 16 Furthermore, since undergraduate and graduate engineering students rarely receive instruction in writing either document, I felt confident that I would be exposing the SURI students to something novel and useful. In addition, as is the case with many of these REU programs, these students are expected to make an oral presentation on their summer’s research during a conference on the final days of the program. There are several other valid reasons to teach undergraduates how to write a literature review. The first is their lack of familiarity with the history, context, and issues of the research field in which they are assigned to work. This is hardly surprising since few undergraduate engineering programs as yet offer majors in nanotechnology, and the technical courses that exist are generally aimed at upperclass and graduate students. 17 In addition, because of logistical issues concerning matching SURI participants to research groups, the students often do not learn their assignment until they arrive on campus, so they have no chance to investigate the field in advance. This lack of knowledge is substantiated by the students’ response to a first-day, in-class informal writing on their research goals in the technical communication seminar--many students write that they are unclear about the specific nature of the research they are about to undertake. Doing the research for a literature review (more on the library research in a later section) sharpens critical reading skills, helping students make the transition from the summarizing and paraphrasing of undergraduate school to the higher-level skills (on Benjamin Bloom’s well known taxonomy of educational objectives) required in graduate school and beyond. 18 In P ge 10946.2 “Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education” addition, assembling the paper requires the ability to logically organize information from different perspectives. 19 The technical communication seminar focused intensely on the literature review for the first four weeks of the summer of 2004. This was a logistical change from the first year, when the document was due at the end of the summer. Several students commented in the 2003 program evaluations that they would have preferred having the literature review due midway through the summer so that they could concentrate on their research and preparations for the final conference during the second four weeks. Apparently this was a better arrangement since no students complained about the timing of the literature review in 2004. To keep the literature review from being overwhelming to the students, the task was broken into several steps. At the first seminar meeting, the students were given an information sheet to discuss with their advisors when they met them for the first time. The advisors were asked to stipulate the number, genres, and age of sources which would be acceptable in the literature review, and to identify the leading journals and conferences in their research field so the students would quickly recognize some credible sources. These sheets are kept on file to make certain the students’ work would conform to the advisors’ expectations; any changes need to be approved by the advisor and me. I teach the content and organization of the literature review by means of handouts and in-class activities. An example of such an activity involves the students collaborating in small groups to suggest possible organizational strategies for a number of abstracts I provide. The students are surprised to compare their strategies and realize that there is no one way in which the same information can be organized. One early class session is devoted to a discussion of research and publication ethics, covering such topics as misrepresenting data and plagiarism. Related to plagiarism is the need for scrupulous documentation and citation practices. Students are instructed to write down complete reference information for any sources they consult. At the third class, they are required to submit a draft of their reference list for the literature review. Many students have had little or no prior experience with documentation of sources, or if they have, they only may have been exposed to the Modern Language Association (MLA) style in an English course. Because many of the journal articles and conference proceedings the students consult are IEEE-affiliated, we use IEEE style in-text citations and reference list. 20 However, I caution the students that in future writing they will need to determine the appropriate style by consulting the requirements of the publication or conference to which they are submitting a paper. Writing process pedagogy is used as a way of encouraging the students to write multiple drafts of their papers in the seminar. Showing students that writing is as much a process as lab research is a means of eradicating the typical “bingeing” behavior of writing papers the night before they are due. 18 To this end, a rough draft of the literature review is due in class a we