Work In Progress: First-Year Student Signature Project - Design an Infographic on "What is Technical Communication?"

There are a number of concepts and skills that are common to all our university students. Technical writing is one of the most relevant and utilized concepts, thus we have developed a project-based ‘writing to learn’ infographic design mini-project assignment to engage first-year students in two different disciplines. Overall, the project aims to demonstrate student competence in four areas of particular interest including audience, ethics, summary and design. We will assess student knowledge using survey questions in each of our targeted areas along with quality assessment of the assignment using a shared rubric. Additionally, we hope that we can capture more longitudinal student information in comparison with first-year and senior students over time. Preliminary results presented in this work in progress report will include examples of student created infographics analyzed in our four assessment areas from both courses and survey data from our initial student cohorts.