Board # 73 : Professional development workshop to promote writing transfer between first-year composition and introductory engineering laboratory courses

Engineering Programs and the Writing Assessment Center of Washington State University Vancouver conducted a 4 day summer professional development workshop for a group (n=12) of faculty and graduate teaching assistants, who instruct first-year composition and introductory engineering laboratory courses. This professional workshop was designed to provide professional development on rhetoric and writing transfer, to build community of practice among instructors from English and engineering to share a passion for engineering students' writing, and to complete the writing transfer module draft so the participants can use them in the academic year of 2016-2017. The workshop contents consisted of three parts, which include 1) rhetorical writing review and rubric development for students’ first-year composition course research papers and engineering lab reports, 2) student writing assessment using the developed rubric both collaboratively and individually, and 3) the instructional materials development to implement writing for transfer into the participants’ courses. The external evaluation team collected data at the beginning and end of the 4-day workshop as well as at the end of every day of the workshop in order to accurately assess the development on a day to day basis as well as the overall impact of the workshop. Through days one, two, and three the level of agreement steadily increased for both disciplinary groups (English and engineering) with participants reporting in the post survey that they strongly agreed or agreed that they had learned rhetorical elements and writing pedagogy.