As engineering continues to grow as a global career, effective communication in the form of technical writing becomes more essential. Professional engineering organizations and universities continually list the ability to communicate technical information as a highly sought attribute in recently-graduated engineers. Unfortunately, numerous logistical challenges prevent many programs from implementing extensive technical writing education within the engineering curriculum. These challenges include budgetary constraints, curriculum credit hour reductions, availability of communication expertise, and both student and faculty resistance to the inclusion of communication instruction in engineering programs. This study aims to identify and refine effective, low-overhead exercises that allow instructors to implement technical writing education into technical existing technical courses. These exercises have the benefit of embedding technical communication into the curriculum, with minimal curricular disruption, and in the context of the technical material that will ultimately need to be communicated. The project proposes innovative application of writing interventions that have been proven effective in other contexts, with the goal of transforming core technical courses in engineering to enhance both the technical capabilities and writing skills of participating students. Initial analysis focuses on the implementation of two technical writing interventions developed and applied to Civil Engineering courses. Preliminary study results on a large course paragraph writing exercise point to the importance of the development of a robust assessment and feedback strategy for the implementation of writing in large classes, as well as the different types of writing that can successfully be incorporated into such classes, in spite of their technical nature.
"Future Girls of STEM" is a university-sponsored, summer camp outreach program that was designed and implemented by an all-female faculty group to increase young girls' interest in pursuing future careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This paper discusses the logistics and results of the pilot Future Girls of STEM camp, which was held in the summer of 2019 for seven to twelve-year-old girls. The four-day summer camp featured female engineers from local industry, who shared personal stories of their careers and helped campers work through engineering and leadership activities. Researchers assessed whether completing the activities increased participants' understanding of, interest in, and self-efficacy in engineering topics, majors, and careers. Results showed an increased interest and self-reported understanding of engineering topics after participants completed the camp, as well as high self-efficacy throughout the camp experience. The Future Girls of STEM program, and its hands-on, interactive activities, can be transferred to other locations or universities with varying resources available.
Writing has been identified as a critical skill and element of the engineering profession, yet it is rarely included in sophomore and junior level courses. Reflecting on our own prior efforts to develop writing assignments for such courses, we became curious about the extent to which the most popular engineering textbooks include writing prompts and related writing activities. This question seemed particularly important given that textbooks often play critical roles in engineering curricula and courses. Textbooks often influence how courses are structured, and reading assignments and homework problems are frequently assigned directly from textbooks. In this project, we systematically searched for and analyzed writing-based problems in six popular fluid mechanics textbooks, with a focus on chapters with similar technical content. We focused our efforts on identifying learning activities that could potentially allow students to practice writing, to learn through writing, and to use writing to relate course content to broader applications and contexts. We discuss our findings by classifying the types of writing prompts found, and we give recommendations for how professors could easily include writing in their courses with some of the textbooks that are already most commonly used. The result of this analysis will be an understanding of how well popular fluid mechanics textbook assignments guide students in writing, and how well the textbooks equip instructors to make use of those assignments. Some possible directions for further research are also proposed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.