Although engineering departments have worked hard at improving the communication skills of their students, a large percentage of industry managers consider the communication skills of engineering graduates to be weak. Why does industry consider these skills to be weak? Also, what particular aspects of written and oral presentation skills does industry consider to be weak in engineering graduates? This paper addresses these two questions through a review of multiple studies that have assessed the communication skills of recent engineering graduates.Our review has found that part of the disparity arises because the communication assignments that engineering students perform in college significantly differ from the writing situations (audiences, purposes, and occasions) that engineering graduates encounter in industry. New engineering graduates do not typically possess the expertise to realize what communication principles from classroom assignments apply, or do not apply, in different professional situations. Yet a third problem is that what constitutes strong communication skills in professional engineering settings may differ considerably from what is taught or expected in classroom settings.Although the literature provides these insights into the disparity, much still needs to be learned about the specific deficiencies in communication skills of entry-level engineers. One step that could be taken is for engineering departments to conduct longitudinal studies about how well their instruction on writing and oral communication prepares students for later classes, for internships and co-ops, and for employment. Departments at different institutions should consider adopting a core of common survey questions so that survey results can be compared.Another recommendation is that when incorporating writing into a course, engineering departments should consider the following two questions:1. What communication skills do we want students to acquire? 2. How can technical assignments be designed to help students achieve those desired communication skills?To answer the first of these questions, engineering departments would do well to identify the specific communication traits that the employers of their graduates see as important. To answer the second question, engineering departments should consult with communication specialists, and preferably those familiar with the kinds of communication that engineers do.
IntroductionLaboratory experiments are a mainstay of undergraduate engineering education. Instructional laboratories are used to satisfy a number of learning objectives, and they are often used as a vehicle for assessing ABET student outcomes for design of experiments, solving engineering problems, and using modern tools of engineering as well as other outcomes that are more distant to the experiments themselves; e.g., teamwork, professionalism and ethics, life-long learning, and especially communications. This paper will describe the process of redesigning a juniorlevel mechanical engineering laboratory on measurements and instrumentation at Georgia Tech. Such classes are fairly standard in ME curricula, and they are often structured so that a new measurement technique, or new sensor/actuator is introduced in every lab. Such courses have the advantage of introducing students to a wide variety of instruments and measurement techniques, but they do this at the risk of losing conceptual connections between the weekly projects. This potential problem was compounded by the original format of the labs, which suffered from having large numbers of objectives and activities that were not well integrated. Finally, to accommodate the need for efficiency in our large program (approximately 300 students per semester), the individual lab projects had become procedure-oriented. Confronted with many different types of labs, equipment, deliverables, and styles, students became dissatisfied with the course, complaining about the workload and questioning the importance of what they were learning.The redesign of the laboratory course was primarily motivated by a desire to increase the inquiry-based aspects of the lab and to de-emphasize and/or eliminate rote procedural formats that characterize many lab classes. The redesign was grounded in the theory of cognitive load, in particular, managing the cognitive load so that the ratio of germane cognitive load to extraneous and inherent cognitive load was maximized (Smith and Kosslyn, 2006). This involved several efforts: 1. Pairing down the number of tasks in each laboratory session, keeping only those with highest value, 2. Developing new formats for deliverables that emphasized higher levels of knowledge, 3. Structuring topics into two-week blocks. The latter point is highly important since it decreases the number of new topics that are introduced, but it also allows students the opportunity to think more deeply about the subject matter before moving on to dissimilar topics. The depth of exposure is highly correlated with the students' ability to reach higher levels of understanding as depicted in various knowledge taxonomies (Shavelson, et al., 2005). BackgroundMuch has been written about the nature of engineering labs. As technology changes, many papers have focused on the opportunities to incorporate new sensor technologies, data acquisition, or real-time control. The incorporation of new technologies does not always result in labs that are more sophisticated. Counter-intuitively...
Many technical documents present information both graphically and verbally. While much is known about the verbal tools of technical professionals, technical graphics have been less fully examined. Here the drawings of a United States patent are examined revealing a system for organizing and presenting visual information that is analogous to commonly-used models for organizing and presenting verbal information.
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