This paper describes the development of a writing guide for the University of Minnesota Duluth's Department of Civil Engineering. Practicing engineers, academics, and accrediting agencies identify written communication as an essential component of an engineer's education. However, faculty experience in grading student work, conducting senior exit interviews, and completing the ABET assessment process, revealed shortcomings in student writing. Therefore, the authors began a project to develop a writing guide for use in all civil engineering courses. The writing guide covers reports, memos, figures, tables, equations, references, general homework submission requirements, and professional e-mails. The authors expect building faculty consensus, achieving an appropriate level of detail, and developing an assessment plan for use of the guide to be the most serious obstacles to its success. To overcome these obstacles, the authors are involving the entire department faculty, including tenured, tenure-track, and term faculty members, in developing and reviewing the project, so that consensus is reached and a common terminology is used. Prior to introducing the writing guide across the department's courses, student volunteers will use a draft to determine if the level of detail is appropriate. Finally, examples of student writing kept for previous ABET assessment and work from the Fall 2014 semester will be assessed to determine a pre-writing guide baseline. Future comparison between that analysis and assessment of post-writing guide student work will dictate whether the guide is helping to improve student writing as well as which sections of the writing guide require improvement.
Matthew (Matt) Swenty obtained his Bachelors and Masters degrees in Civil Engineering from Missouri S&T and then worked as a bridge designer at the Missouri Department of Transportation. He returned to school to obtain his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering at Virginia Tech followed by research work at the Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center on concrete bridges. He is currently an associate professor of Civil Engineering at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI). He teaches engineering mechanics and structural engineering courses at VMI and enjoys working with the students on bridge related research projects and with the ASCE student chapter.
The University of Minnesota Duluth's Department of Civil Engineering accepted its first students in 2008, graduated its first class in 2012, and first offered a capstone design course in the spring semester, 2012. Groups of five to six students designed a building on a local site. Students organized their teams based on interest in a particular branch of civil engineering, allowing individual students to focus their efforts on a particular subject. Based on feedback from faculty, practicing engineers, and students, several changes were implemented prior to the fall 2012 semester. These changes included making the group size smaller, modifying the graded submissions, and changing the project location. Most significantly, the course was reorganized to prevent students from working the entire semester in one area of civil engineering while doing little to no work in other areas. This paper compares the different capstone design experiences. Results from the analysis are part of a larger comparison between narrow, in-depth and broad, general approaches to design experiences for undergraduate civil engineering students.
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