Board # 73 : Professional development workshop to promote writing transfer between first-year composition and introductory engineering laboratory courses

Abstract

Adesope is an Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at Washington State University, Pullman. His research is at the intersection of educational psychology, learning sciences, and instructional design and technology. His recent research focuses on the cognitive and pedagogical underpinnings of learning with computer-based multimedia resources; knowledge representation through interactive concept maps; meta-analysis of empirical research, and investigation of instructional principles and assessments in STEM.c American Society for Engineering Education, 2017 1 Professional development workshop to promote writing transfer between first year composition and introductory engineering laboratory courses AbstractEngineering Programs and the Writing Assessment Center of Washington State University Vancouver conducted a 4 day summer professional development workshop for a group (n=12) of faculty and graduate teaching assistants, who instruct first-year composition and introductory engineering laboratory courses. This professional workshop was designed to provide professional development on rhetoric and writing transfer, to build community of practice among instructors from English and engineering to share a passion for engineering students' writing, and to complete the writing transfer module draft so the participants can use them in the academic year of 2016-2017. The workshop contents consisted of three parts, which include 1) rhetorical writing review and rubric development for students' first-year composition course research papers and engineering lab reports, 2) student writing assessment using the developed rubric both collaboratively and individually, and 3) the instructional materials development to implement writing for transfer into the participants' courses. The external evaluation team collected data at the beginning and end of the 4-day workshop as well as at the end of every day of the workshop in order to accurately assess the development on a day to day basis as well as the overall impact of the workshop. Through days one, two, and three the level of agreement steadily increased for both disciplinary groups (English and engineering) with participants reporting in the post survey that they strongly agreed or agreed that they had learned rhetorical elements and writing pedagogy.

Perspectives and Practices of Undergraduate/Graduate Teaching Assistants on Writing Pedagogical Knowledge and Lab Report Evaluation in Engineering Laboratory Courses

“…The pre-term workshop was designed to deliver the fundamentals of lab report writing to the U/GTAs, addressing training objectives, the instructors' expectations, and writing fundamentals, which began with "deep reading" process [21]. In the deep reading session, small groups of 2-3 participants worked together to describe the strengths and the weaknesses in student lab report samples.…”

Peer Review and Reflection in Engineering Labs: Writing to Learn and Learning to Write

“…Although notoriously complicated, a number of universities have sought to better integrate technical writing courses and engineering courses [4,[7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. In some instances, this has involved professional development for engineering faculty on teaching writing [14,15], providing classroom-tested technical writing tasks [16], and more commonly, close collaboration between engineering faculty and a technical writing instructor from the English department or a writing center [13]. For instance, faculty from English and civil engineering co-designed and co-taught a course, with the writing instructor providing feedback on drafts [9].…”