Project-Directed Writing Assistance in Construction Management Program

Employers and teachers have long been concerned about students majoring in various disciplines whose poor written English prevents them from reaching their full potential in the university and in their professional lives. In engineering and construction management programs in particular, the workplace success of new graduates is ultimately affected by their oral and written communication skills. However, these students’ academic preparation for industry’s needs in terms of written communication has been widely acknowledged as inadequate. For instance, the consistently low results on the communication skills section of the American Institute of Constructors exam taken by the students majoring in Construction Management show the urgent need for discipline-specific writing instruction. It is, therefore, imperative that such students be offered help with discipline-specific written discourse. Yet the number of writing intensive classes for such students and the number of professionals who specialize in developing writing programs and services for these students are rather small. This empirical study fills this gap by investigating how project-directed supplemental writing assistance affects writing quality in a junior-level construction management class. By using both quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection and analysis, the researchers examined the students’ progress in writing two drafts of a proposal and assessed students’ performance on the following commonly problematic areas: formatting, clarity of data/results presentation, and appropriateness of writing for intended audience. The results of the study suggest that supplemental writing assistance has a significant overall positive effect on student writing, and is especially beneficial in heightening their audience awareness. The results of this study indicate that more writing opportunities and project-directed instruction in on disciplinary writing should be provided to students to help them become successful in their future careers. Introduction and background For a career in construction management (CM) and engineering, effective communication skills are crucial despite a common misconception that these professionals deal mostly with quantitative information. Construction managers, in particular, are expected not only to be able to comprehend technical documents such as those developed by engineers, but also to communicate the intent of these documents to less technically inclined subcontractors. In fact, the Construction Industry Institute indicates that communication is the single most important factor contributing to successful project management. Moreover, the higher CM and engineering specialists climb the professional job ladder, the more writing they will be required to perform. The field of CM education differs from that of civil engineering in that it tends to be more applied and devotes more attention to management and techniques than its engineering counterpart, and less time to basic science, mathematics, and design. However, there are many similarities between the two fields of study in terms of general program content. Since there is a dearth of research specifically relating to writing in the field of construction management, we will often draw upon closely related findings from engineering. P ge 22193.2 Previous research suggests that the workplace success of new graduates is ultimately affected by their oral and written communication skills. Thus, the importance of effective writing and communication skills for construction managers and engineers is generally recognized and always scored high on employers’ lists of desirable attributes. Previous research has also shown that while graduating engineering students are competent technically, they often lack communication skills, which prevents them from reaching their full potential in the workplace or academic careers . In light of these facts, learning technical communication skills, and writing skills in particular, becomes crucial for all engineering and construction management students. Academic preparation of students for professional writing The importance of the effective skills in oral, written, and graphical communication of ideas of future engineers has been pointed out as early as 1955 in the Report of the Committee on Evaluation of Engineering Education. However, while a range of approaches to teaching communication skills and writing to engineering undergraduates is available, the inadequacy of academic writing programs in preparing new engineering hires to communicate effectively in the workplace has been widely acknowledged. A concern about this lack of professional preparation of engineering graduates’ in terms of communication skills has also been voiced by both U.S. companies and ABET (the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology), who argue that in addition to having superior technical skills, today’s engineering graduates should be able to communicate effectively, perform well in the global workplace, function in multidisciplinary teams, and use problem-solving and criticalthinking skills. The changes in the ABET engineering assessment criteria raised interest in studying student performance in multiple areas, including writing, because one of the criteria that institutions undergoing ABET’s accreditation process must meet is students’ “ability to communicate effectively” both verbally and in writing. In light of these facts, technical communication skills, and writing skills in particular, become especially important for engineering and construction management students alike, and learning these skills becomes crucial for them. Although the importance of writing has been emphasized by faculty and practitioners alike, many students view writing as merely part of their coursework but not as an activity that is essentially related to their career goals. Faculty echo these observations by acknowledging that students rarely take seriously even required English and humanities classes and often see them as a break from their technical courses and as a task that is external to engineering practice. Thus, the perceived notion held by students that engineers generally do not need to write and the diametrically opposed perceptions of engineering faculty and industry that students lack necessary writing skills make it difficult to successfully implement writing in engineering. Further, although faculty regularly stress the importance of writing, they are frequently unwilling to teach it to their students, often due to faculty beliefs that despite their own publications and writing in the workplace, “their knowledge about [discipline-specific] writing and responding to writing does not meet the needs of their students. These professors do not feel competent to either teach or evaluate writing and are often unaware of which aspects of their writing are P ge 22193.3 based on personal preferences and which are specific to the whole discipline. Moreover, resistance to incorporating writing in the curriculum can sometimes be due to the added burden to these professors who will have to read and evaluate students’ written work. In the past, it has been assumed that introductory-level freshman composition courses can prepare undergraduate students from a variety of disciplines to communicate more effectively in their majors. However, because typical assignments in these writing courses are too different from what students are being asked to produce in their respective fields of study, the transferability of writing skills becomes doubtful 16, . In fact, the results of multiple surveys of engineering students and graduates point to the fact that English departments may not be the appropriate place to teach engineers to become effective technical writers and that teaching technical writing in the context of engineering discipline may provide a link between writing and engineering and thus may aid students in transferring writing skills learned to other engineering contexts requiring writing. In response to these concerns, other approaches to improving the communication skills of undergraduates have been developed, including (a) requiring students take general technical communication courses taught within English departments, (b) establishing communication labs providing assistance with students’ writing on a voluntary basis, and (c) providing disciplinespecific intensive writing courses. Required technical communications courses taught in English departments may present opportunities for engineering students to be exposed to some of the genres used in engineering. However, these courses are typically intended for students from a wide range of disciplines and provide instruction on a variety of genres, some of which may have little resemblance to those practiced in engineering, making knowledge transfer into their engineering courses challenging. In fact, previous research shows that many engineering students fail to apply rhetorical strategies learned in one context to similar writing tasks they face in different contexts because they tend to interpret those tasks as completely different. Further, what might be considered effective communication in one discipline may not necessarily be thought of in this way in another, which can further translate into differing assessment practices used by writing and engineering instructors. General technical communications courses, therefore, may not be the most desirable context for discipline-specific writing instruction of engineering and construction management undergraduates. Another frequently used approach to improving the communication skills and writing of engineering students, for instance, involves creating communication labs that provide assistance with students’ writing on a voluntary basis. However, such labs generally employ instructors from English departments; therefore, the extent to which the instruction can aid