Conference Session

Why Industry Says that our Engineering Students Cannot Write

Collection

2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Scott Duncan, Valparaiso University; Mark M. Budnik, Valparaiso University; Jeffrey Will, Valparaiso University; Peter E. Johnson, Valparaiso University; Shahin S. Nudehi, Valparaiso University

Tagged Divisions

Liberal Education/Engineering & Society, Mechanical Engineering

remain unobserved in a team environment. Finally,faculty must emphasize and students must realize the importance of communication to the designprocess, the success of their project, and their future success in the workplace.In this paper, we describe the strategies employed at Valparaiso University (VU) to overcomethe challenges of implementing technical communication in a Capstone Senior Design course.The paper begins with a brief summary of the Capstone Senior Design course at VU and thenidentifies each significant technical communication implementation challenge along with therelevant implementation strategy. Finally, the results of a student survey to assess theeffectiveness of the technical communication instruction in the VU Capstone

Conference Session

Rethinking PowerPoint and Other Acts of Communication

Collection

2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Elena Poltavtchenko, Northern Arizona University; John Tingerthal, Northern Arizona University

Tagged Divisions

Liberal Education/Engineering & Society

AC 2011-1170: PROJECT-DIRECTED WRITING ASSISTANCE IN CON-STRUCTION MANAGEMENT PROGRAMElena Poltavtchenko, Northern Arizona University Elena Poltavtchenko is a Ph.D. candidate in the Applied Linguistics program at Northern Arizona Univer- sity. She is a graduate teaching assistant at NAU’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Elena obtained her B.A. in Russian Linguistics and Literature in Novosibirsk State University, Russia, and M.A. in English Applied Linguistics at the University of Houston, TX. Her current research interests lie in the area of writing in the disciplines, with a specific focus on writing in engineering.John Tingerthal, Northern Arizona University John joined the Construction

Conference Session

Integration of Liberal Education into Engineering

Collection

2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Tom A. Eppes, University of Hartford; Ivana Milanovic, University of Hartford; Frederick Sweitzer, University of Hartford

Tagged Divisions

Engineering Ethics, Liberal Education/Engineering & Society

. • Professional – Included for all E majors and covers topics common to disciplines. Currently, ET programs do not have a professional component. • Capstone – An integrating experience of 3 to 6 semester credits and taken in the final year of study in which the student completes an unscripted design project. • Other – A technical communication course sequence focused on written and oral skills taken by all ET majors.Broader Educational ContextThe changes being mandated by NEASC are part of a much larger policy initiative that isnational in scope. Most, if not all regional accreditation boards are undertaking similar efforts intheir respective areas of authority. Over the last decade, concern over the quality of highereducation

Conference Session

Making Students Aware of Their World: Five Perspectives

Collection

2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Cherrice Traver, Union College; Douglass Klein, Union College; Borjana Mikic, Smith College; Atsushi Akera, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Steven B. Shooter, Bucknell University; Ari W. Epstein, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; David Gillette, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

Tagged Divisions

Liberal Education/Engineering & Society

brought together academic leaders and scholars from both engineering and theliberal arts to explore models for integrating engineering and the traditional liberal arts.The examples presented are grouped into five different aspects of undergraduate engineeringeducation, addressing different phases of students’ progress, recognizing that fosteringinnovation must be a continuous process: 1. Projects that focus on first year or introductory material 2. Projects that focus on core engineering courses 3. Projects that focus on capstone and extra-curricular experiences 4. Projects that span the curriculum 5. Faculty professional development to support projectsThe paper also reviews research results linking innovative capacity to the

Conference Session

Making Students Aware of Their World: Five Perspectives

Collection

2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Warren N. Waggenspack Jr., Louisiana State University; Warren R. Hull, Louisiana State University; David Bowles, Louisiana State University; Sarah Liggett, Louisiana State University; Stephen O. Sears, Louisiana State University

Tagged Divisions

Liberal Education/Engineering & Society

. The respondents held a variety of opinions about theimportance of understanding cultural diversity (Figure 3). Most respondents found it important(36.8%) or vitally important (31.6%). Only 3 respondents (7.9%) thought engineers could expectto succeed without it. At our university, both the student population and the faculty represent avariety of cultures. The groups working on projects in our capstone courses often includestudents from diverse cultural backgrounds. Working in small groups with group members froma variety of cultural backgrounds allows students to identify and confront issues that arise whencultural norms differ.While many aspects of globalism can be addressed by this model, many cannot. Temporal orspatial issues, such as

Conference Session

Rethinking PowerPoint and Other Acts of Communication

Collection

2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

April A. Kedrowicz, University of Utah; Maria Dawn Blevins, University of Utah

Tagged Divisions

Liberal Education/Engineering & Society

withactual engineering projects to show students how intricately linked communication andteamwork skills are with engineering problem solving and design. Much emphasis is placed onsenior capstone courses, as this meets the immediate demand of preparing graduating seniors forthe non-technical aspects of their careers. In contrast, freshman classes receive less attention interms of their position to “set the tone” for the coupling of communication and engineering,likely because the demands placed on freshman engineering classes are already high. They serveas a recruitment tool, pique interest in engineering, expose students to the many and varied areasof concentration in the discipline, and perhaps, introduce students to engineering projects andbasic

Conference Session

Why Industry Says that our Engineering Students Cannot Write

Collection

2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

William K. Durfee, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; Benjamin Adams, University of Minnesota; Audrey J. Appelsies, University of Minnesota; Pamela Flash, University of Minnesota

Tagged Divisions

Liberal Education/Engineering & Society, Mechanical Engineering

Spring 2010, a baselinemeasure was taken of capstone design project reports. The evaluation team consisted of onemechanical engineering faculty (a disciplinary "insider") and two experts in college-level writing(disciplinary "outsiders"). Design reports were rated on a two point scale (“sufficient” or“insufficient”) using criteria derived from the list of desired writing abilities. Included in theresults were that students were most successful in applying knowledge of physics, mathematicsand engineering to their writing (rated sufficient in more than 80% of the samples) and leastsuccessful in summarizing key points (rated sufficient in less than 40% of the samples).Every six years the mechanical engineering undergraduate program goes through

Conference Session

Communication: From Pecha Kucha to Bullets

Collection

2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Kenneth R. Leitch, West Texas A&M University; Rhonda B Dittfurth, West Texas A&M University; Freddie J Davis P.E., West Texas A&M University

Tagged Divisions

Liberal Education/Engineering & Society

curriculum.Even more modest approaches to improved technical writing skills of engineering students have been utilized withmeasurable improvements. The United States Coast Guard Academy (USCGA) developed an engineering technicalstyle writing guide in conjunction with the university writing center6. Similarly, Embry-Riddle AeronauticalUniversity developed a style guide in conjunction with humanities and communications faculty7. The University ofMaine has developed a partnership between the Civil Engineering Department and the English Department toimprove the technical laboratory writing skills of freshmen students8. The University of Houston9 has developed apartnership between its writing center and a multidisciplinary engineering capstone course in order

Conference Session

Integration of Liberal Education into Engineering

Collection

2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Vassilios Tzouanas, University of Houston, Downtown; Lea Campbell, University of Houston, Downtown

Tagged Divisions

Engineering Ethics, Liberal Education/Engineering & Society

application of teaming skills. Courses whichencompass a major team engineering project are a natural point in the curriculum to includeteaming instruction.Because of these constraints, the curriculum which is described in this paper is designed to beinterspersed within the existing coursework of a senior seminar or capstone course whichincludes a major team project as its focus. The tradeoff with this approach is that the teaminginformation presented must be limited to what is most salient and necessary for graduates on thecusp of entering the work force. Students are provided with targeted readings in an effort toprovide an additional degree of depth.The eight teaming lessons outlined in the curriculum in Appendix A are designed to be presentedas

Conference Session

Why Industry Says that our Engineering Students Cannot Write

Collection

2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Jeffrey A. Donnell, Georgia Institute of Technology; Betsy M. Aller, Western Michigan University; Michael Alley, Pennsylvania State University, University Park; April A. Kedrowicz, University of Utah

Tagged Divisions

Liberal Education/Engineering & Society, Mechanical Engineering

AC 2011-1503: WHY INDUSTRY SAYS THAT ENGINEERING GRADU-ATES HAVE POOR COMMUNICATION SKILLS: WHAT THE LITERA-TURE SAYSJeffrey A. Donnell, Georgia Institute of Technology Jeffrey Donnell coordinates the Frank K. Webb Program in Professional Communication at Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical EngineeringBetsy M. Aller, Western Michigan University Betsy M. Aller is an associate professor in industrial and manufacturing engineering at Western Michigan University, where she teaches and coordinates the capstone design project sequence. She also teaches first-year engineering, manufacturing for sustainability, and graduate-level project management courses.Michael Alley, Pennsylvania State University

Conference Session

Why Industry Says that our Engineering Students Cannot Write

Collection

2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Susan Conrad, Portland State University; Timothy James Pfeiffer P.E., Foundation Engineering, Inc.

Tagged Divisions

Liberal Education/Engineering & Society, Mechanical Engineering

success. The major does not require any writing coursesbeyond the general university requirements. However, classes for the major include manywriting assignments: lab reports, essays about issues in the profession, various structure or sitedescriptions (e.g. visiting and describing a bridge for a bridge engineering class), design reports,proposals, tech memos, and numerous other writing tasks. In their capstone design course,students work on a design project for a real client with whom they meet. Some other coursesinvent client contexts for writing – for example, framing a homework analysis problem as aclient’s request for an investigation, with the results presented in a tech memo written to theclient.Ten engineering consulting firms in the

Conference Session

Integration of Liberal Education into Engineering

Collection

2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

George D. Ricco, Purdue University, West Lafayette

Tagged Divisions

Engineering Ethics, Liberal Education/Engineering & Society

-governance may mean an institution governing itself,Heidegger clearly states that Dasein’s continuous self-examination within the academic sphere isthe only path to subject mastery. The discussion place of the apprentice engineer in modern society and how he or shenegotiates that sphere, and in the greater context how engineering as a whole can be grounded interms of design and soiological principles. Engineering design research currently(41,42) concludesthat engineering expertise and thus engineering mastery is not something that can be explicitlynoted, but something that one knows when one sees it. While there are books, classes, and“capstone” projects in engineering, a real engineer cannot be strictly defined by any textbookdefinition. The

Conference Session

Why Industry Says that our Engineering Students Cannot Write

Collection

2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Kathryn Mobrand, University of Washington; Jennifer A Turns, University of Washington

Tagged Divisions

Liberal Education/Engineering & Society, Mechanical Engineering

and, further, that communication skills are very important in theworkplace.Mastery. Participants describe the various communication activities that they have engaged in,and some describe the particular competencies that they have mastered, as illustrated in thefollowing excerpts from portfolios and survey responses.In this first example, the participant describes in her experiences communicating in differentmodes and media and the importance of that communication to her groups’ work. A game capstone project "Paint bomber" is a good example of how exchanging thoughts and ideas with others was crucial to the game design process and very beneficial. I had to explain and describe our ideas to the rest of our classmates visually

Conference Session

Rethinking PowerPoint and Other Acts of Communication

Collection

2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Laura R. Grossenbacher, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Christina Matta, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Technical Communication Program

Tagged Divisions

Liberal Education/Engineering & Society

require that they write and speak in such a way that they can be understoodby all of the others; the Mechanical Engineers must be able to talk to classmates who arestudying Civil and Environmental Engineering, Industrial and Systems Engineering, EngineeringMechanics, Nuclear Engineering, or any other of the eleven undergraduate majors within ourcollege – not including the students from other programs who venture into our class. Allstudents, regardless of their major, must be able to describe their chosen technical projects using Page 22.579.3the jargon of their field but explaining those concepts well enough that all of those otherengineers