Emphasizing Research (Further) in Undergraduate Technical Communication Curricula: Involving Undergraduate Students with an Academic Journal's Publication and Management

Abstract

This article presents follow-up information to a previous publication regarding ways to increase emphasis on research skills in undergraduate Technical Communication curricula. We detail the ways our undergraduate program highlights research by requiring majors to complete senior thesis projects that culminate in submission to an online peer-reviewed journal housed at our institution. This article also describes the roles our undergraduate students play in helping to manage the publication of that academic journal, an activity that further increases students' awareness of the research process and the value of writing for an academic audience beyond the classroom.

A Field-Wide Metasynthesis of Pedagogical Research in Technical and Professional Communication

“…An example of empirical research using interviews can be found in Taylor’s (2011) study of how students interpret instructor feedback. As an example of a textually based study, we consider Ford and Newmark’s (2011), which involves considerations of how to incorporate an emphasis on research through their examination of students’ work on an undergraduate writing journal.…”

Latin-American writing initiatives in engineering from Spanish-speaking countries

“…hese initiatives are undertaking by the following stages: a) literature review and research about a speciic topic of the ield; b) oral presentations for department staf and guests (practitioners); c) conference presentations; and, d) journal submissions. hese initiatives also advocate for journal internships in which students learn how to write to be published and how to manage the publishing backstage (i.e., the administrative side of communicating with reviewers and authors, as well as the technical side of journal production by web design, content management, website updating, and e-journal promotion) (Ford & Newmark, 2011).…”

“…he U.S. scholarship of teaching on science communication and research skills (Ford & Newmark, 2011) might be further explored in the Latin-American case by contextualizing what counts as scientiic knowledge production and to what extent this is related to higher education in general and to Engineering majors in particular. hese particular U.S. experiences for teaching genre practices that merge scientiic and professional audiences (e.g., literature reviews or oral presentations that are addressing simultaneously academic and industry audiences) (Ford & Newmark, 2011) continue nourishing conversations about the rhetorical nature of science and technology (science as argument) (Miller, 2004). In this regard, it is interesting to mention that in the Latin-American case, two pedagogically-oriented publications mentioned as limitation that students struggle in developing audience awareness (López & Ramírez, 2012;; this diiculty might be also associated with assigning writing activities that are exclusively addressing instructors (writing to learn).…”

Engaging undergraduate students to analyze the results of published research articles

“…Previous studies have shown that the instructors have tried different strategies (Ball et al, 2020) to enhance the research experience of undergraduate students by designing suitable research assignments as a course project. Moreover, a survey of old literature reveals that the undergraduate research activities undertaken are through summer internship projects (Houser & Lemmons, 2018), course project/term projects (Amekudzi et al, 2010;Ford & Newmark, 2011;Ponce et al, 2021), or some kind of special research program organized involving undergraduate students. For example, the study reported by (Morley et al, 1998) is an evaluation of junior-level undergraduate students mentored by a graduate student during an eight-week program summer internship program.…”