Writing in Engineering Courses

Abstract

By incorporating writing in engineering courses, we can move toward several important educational goals. Writing allows students to develop and use critical thinking skills. It enhances active learning and addresses the needs of students with different learning styles. It is a uniquely powerful tool for assessing student understanding. Writing becomes particularly useful in engineering education when demonstrated as a process. Similarities between the writing and design processes can be used to highlight the fact that there is often no single “correct” solution in either and that feedback and revision are often crucial to both. Finally, the status of our profession is enhanced when engineering graduates can communicate effectively. This paper provides specific examples of how we have employed writing in our courses over the last three years and how it has served to enhance outcomes in these courses.

Effects of an educational intervention on the technical writing competence of engineering students

“…Furthermore, the participants considered that writing summaries is useful not only to learn how to write well, but as a strategy to study more deeply topics from other subjects. These perceptions are consistent to the conclusions in other researches (Wheeler & McDonald, 2000;Beltrán, 2003;Alharbi, 2015).…”

“…The students can compare their version to the teachers'; and give their opinion about the quality of their own summary and the one that teachers made. This exercise enables to emphasize that the summary of a text can have more than one acceptable version (Wheeler & McDonald, 2000). This activity takes an hour of class.…”

“…In the work context, writing enables the engineer to communicate with their peers, to be effective at their work activities, reach high positions and gain self-confidence (Pneena & Romanowski, 2001). In an educational context, through writing, the engineer achieves many goals: representing physical realities in order to create or exchange knowledge, understanding completely the study topics, developing critical thinking and reflective capability, connecting ideas orderly, among others (Winsor, 1990;Wheeler & McDonald, 2000). This paper presents the design, implementation and appraisal of an educational intervention, based on the WAC methodology.…”

Coaching for Communicative Competence: A Student-Focused Approach

“…Furthermore, as Goldberg, Caves, and Reynolds observe, students typically "devote considerable effort to the design and development of their projects," but "are not as motivated to devote time and effort to writing" [1]. Another problematic aspect is that, as Wheeler and McDonald note, faculty members can resist the additional investment of time required to evaluate submissions specifically for writing quality, and may be uncomfortable evaluating skills that fall outside of their technical specialties [2].…”

“…However, using a recursive approach similar to that used to develop the rubrics, we have been able to shift the focus of these meetings. Since the processes of engineering design and technical writing contain many of the same elements (an initial stage of creativity, improvement via multiple iterations, and the central idea that a perfect solution remains impossible) [2], it is particularly fitting that the coaching sessions now support more open-ended discussions of student-specific issues.…”