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Session 2131

Assessment of Teaming, Writing, and Speaking Instruction in Chemical Engineering Courses Steven W. Peretti, Paula Berardinelli, Lisa Bullard, Deanna P. Dannels, Dave Kmiec , Chris M. Anson, Chris Daubert

North Carolina State University

A multidisciplinary faculty team at North Carolina State University has been iteratively designing and implementing teaming, writing, and speaking instructional modules to be implemented within a junior-level chemical engineering laboratory course and a senior level capstone design course. The laboratory course is the first course in the curriculum to require collaborative writing and oral presentations, so team management and interpersonal dynamics within the team structure are integral parts of the instructional material. The senior capstone design course in chemical engineering provides students with a realistic experience of industrial practice in process design. At NCSU, this often involves industrial sponsorship and mentoring of projects that require a multidisciplinary student team. This presents the students with unique teaming, writing and speaking challenges as they attempt to transcend genre-specific communication norms to produce coherent and effective documents and presentations. The paper will report the research findings and assessment results of this three-year effort, with a focus on the performance of the most recent year's courses. These represent the first offerings of fully developed teaming, writing and speaking (TWS) instruction in each class. The results indicate that while TWS instruction does contribute to enhanced performance in the laboratory class, senior design has so many confounding factors, such as the presence of team members from different disciplines, the possible receipt of previous TWS instruction, and the different levels of project mentor involvement, that TWS instruction did not significantly improve teaming, writing and speaking performance. Future curricular implementation issues and instructional recommendations will be proposed, based on these results.

Description of Instruction

Junior Level Unit Operations Course

The junior-level Teaming, Writing, and Speaking (TWS) instruction series was designed to complement a junior-level chemical engineering laboratory survey course (CHE 330). As a part of CHE 330, students meet one morning a week for hour-long lectures on statistics and experimental design. In addition, they have one three-hour afternoon period reserved every week for experiments. Students who enroll in the course attend four two-hour TWS modules, which take place during their allotted lab time on weeks when there is no experiment scheduled. As a team, they also schedule four one-hour appointments throughout the semester with a writing and speaking consultant. The junior-level TWS module focuses on developing collaborative oral and written technical communication skills. Module content addresses how members of teams prepare oral and “Proceedings of the 2004 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2004, American Society for Engineering"

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Daubert, C., & Peretti, S., & Berardinelli, P., & Dannels, D., & Anson, C., & Bullard, L. (2004, June), Assessment Of Teaming, Writing, And Speaking Instruction In Che Capstone Design Paper presented at 2004 Annual Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--13461