Cultivating technical writing skills through a scaffold peer review-approach of lab reports in a junior-level laboratory course

Abstract

Communication skills is always on the top of list of the largest gaps between the career readiness of new college graduates and employer rated importance across all disciplinaries of higher education including engineering. Unfortunately, many students enter engineering programs with the wrong notion that engineering profession requires much math and science but little literacy. On the other hand, few engineering programs can afford a separate course dedicated to technical writing within the already tight credit budget.The content of the lab reports is generally more directly controlled by engineering faculty teaching the course. Lab reports thus serve as a good tool to sharpen writing skills. Practically, however, providing consistent, quality feedback on lab reports is a time-intensive endeavor for the instructors. One potential solution is to leverage peer feedback. In addition to the obvious benefit of reducing the grading load of the instructor, this approach increases the students' self-awareness of the standards and facilitates internalization of expert judgment abilities about report writing. The challenge of this approach is that without clear structure and guidance, the peer review process will result in students not performing a meaningful review of their peers' work.In this paper, I report my investigation of the effectiveness of a 'scaffold peer review' approach in lab report assignments and grading. The goal of the approach is to cultivate students' technical writing skills with significant buy-in from both the students' side and the instructor's side. The key elements of this approach are scaffolding report assignments with component writing, guided peer review, and revision. The scaffolding part of this approach aims at building up students' writing skill one component at a time towards a full-length report. For each report, students need to review another student's writing and answering a peer review questionnaire. The 'peer review questionnaire' serves as the primary guiding tool for peer-review. By answering a series of questions in the questionnaire, students present the evidence for their rating of others and give suggestions for improvement. They also give an initial grade to their reviewed writing according to a detailed rubric. After the peer review, each student has a chance to revise their own report. By focusing on only part of the full-length report, the grading burden is also reduced.Direct and indirect assessments of students' technical writing skills were carried out in three semesters of the implementation of the 'scaffold peer review' approach in a junior level laboratory course. Results of the assessments show significant improvement of the technical writing skills of students. Students' reflection on about this approach and their perception about technical writing in general also confirmed the positive impact of this approach. Although the implementation is within the Engineering Physics program, the structure of this approach is readily applicable to a wide range of engineering ...