Engineering-Other (59) This project creates a website that provides writing samples, heuristics, and prompts to teach writing to engineering students. The web-based tool introduces engineering students to the process of writing widely-used classroom and work-place documents such as lab reports, project reports and memos. The tool, called "The Coach," guides students through basic writing activities such as prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing and prompts students to consider genre-specific details of audience, purpose, and message. The plan is to include The Coach within some of the writing requirement courses for engineering students at the partner institutions of the University of Alabama, the University of Texas at Tyler, and Bevill State Community College.
Technical writing is an important component of undergraduate engineering education. Many educational institutions and potential employers of engineering students have concerns about the young graduate's ability to write proficiently. To tackle this problem, engineering programs have adopted a number of techniques including the written style guide for creating engineering reports. However, faculty members also see students responding more readily to electronic systems. The goal of this project was to develop web-based modules where students would write and receive immediate feedback on the quality of their work. "The Coach" creates a means of providing writing prompts and feedback to students to allow them to submit a more polished technical document. During this project, following the creation of the writing modules, samples of de-identified student writing were evaluated for their writing quality. Additionally students were surveyed regarding their attitudes toward writing. This project contained both groups using The Coach as well as control groups. Students in several courses participated in this project. De-identified samples of their technical laboratory reports were evaluated based on four criteria: 1) use of professional language, 2) proper use of Tables and Figures, 3) logical organization, and 4) appropriate level of detail. Each criterion was evaluated on a 5 point scale, with 1--strongly disagree and 5--strongly agree. So for instance, if a paper was full of slang and colloquialisms, it would receive a score of "1" on professional language. If another paper was well-organized and easy to follow, it would receive a "5" on logical organization, and so on. Based on this writing analysis scheme, the written work that was evaluated showed a measurable improvement in the writing of students who used "The Coach" as compared to those who didn't. This was true for all four categories. However, although this improvement was measurable, it was not a large difference--less than "1" in all cases. As the evaluation of the papers was not entirely objective, the improvement with "The Coach" may not really be a significant difference. From the survey of engineering student attitudes toward writing, some more interesting things were found. All participants had either completed freshman composition or had placed out of it. This survey also used a 5-point scale. "The Coach" was helpful for Getting Started and for Organizing my ideas.--4.00 Professional engineers communicate in written form several times a week. It is important for people in my occupation to write well. Students felt less strong about the following statements, although they were still on the positive side of the five-point scale. "The Coach" helped me write a better report than I would have written without it. (3.74) "The Coach" provided me with useful suggestions on how to write reports. (3.79) The information provided by The Coach on how to write was helpful. (3.89) I learned some writing techniques that will help me in future writing assignments. (3.37) "The Coach" would be a good program to use in other Engineering courses that have writing assignments. (3.53) and it was still reported Writing is a very unpleasnt experience for me. (3.58) A web-based writing assistant was developed. It gives students feedback on their writing that is more than just spell-checking. It asks them questions about their technical content and whether they are explaining the big picture. Students who used this tool seemed to do slightly better with their written work. However, despite the additional technology, engineering students still did not like to write.
