A Partnership Model for Integrating Technical Communication Habits Throughout Undergraduate Engineering Courses

The ability to communicate well is an important skill for engineers in the workplace. This descriptive study describes a collaboration between a writing specialist and an engineering instructor to integrate writing instruction into engineering coursework. The sample included all 12 students in a junior level Chemical Engineering (CHME) laboratory course. These same students were followed through the next course in the sequence, taught by the same chemical engineering instructor. Intensive guidance was provided to students in the junior level lab, including co-taught lectures, feedback on drafts, and required revision tasks. Scaffolds and teamtaught activities were gradually faded for the remaining lab reports, but the engineering instructor continued to provide ongoing and individualized feedback on all lab reports. In both courses, students drew upon a set of collaboratively–developed online resources. Data collection included statistics of students’ use of online writing resources, student self-reports, lab report grades, in-class writing exercises, and teaching artifacts. Results from the self-reports indicate that students perceived the lab report writing process to be more difficult than understanding the technical engineering content of labs in the junior level course. In the senior level course, however, students’ perceptions of the writing challenges varied depending on how difficult they found the technical content of the lab. Mean and median lab report scores in both junior and senior level courses were similar, suggesting that students’ writing achievement was sustained over time, despite the more challenging technical content in the senior level course. These findings suggest that students in the CHME partnership study applied what they learned from the instruction and resources that collaboration among faculty of different disciplines afforded them. This descriptive study of a partnership model is offered as one example of bringing new and critical perspectives to engineering education.