Creating Communicative Self-Efficacy through Integrating and Innovating Engineering Communication Instruction

Cornell University’s Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the College of Engineering’s Engineering Communications Program (ECP) have developed a sophomore to senior, communication-across-the-curriculum plan, called the “MAE/ECP Initiative,” to meet the needs of students, faculty, the college, and industry alike in their quest to heighten the preprofessional skills of graduating students. At its core, the partnership encourages the students' development of communicative self-efficacy in meeting the complex communicative demands related to performing technical work in mechanical and aerospace engineering. This paper discusses the pedagogical framework, the research paradigm, the foundational concepts (engineering communication: communicative practice, context, communicative design, and engineering identity), communication modalities (written, oral, visual, electronic) and outcomes (including ABET alignments) as collected by our two years of student survey data. The incredible success of Year1’s quantitative findings are outlined in full. For example, in response to our communicative self-efficacy survey, the scores across all communicative modalities increased substantially (changing from low-medium to mid-high range) for all the students taking the pilot. In addition, on 17 of the 23 items on the survey, 80% of the pilot students scored in the high range. We believe that it safe to claim that the pilot has had a profound and very positive impact on students’ reported communicative self-efficacy in MAE engineering contexts.