Salt Lake City, Utah
June 23, 2018
June 23, 2018
July 27, 2018
Liberal Education/Engineering & Society
23
10.18260/1-2--30633
https://peer.asee.org/30633
677
Judy Randi, Ed.D. is Professor of Education at the University of New Haven where she is currently teaching in the Tagliatela College of Engineering and coordinating a college-wide initiative, the Project to Integrate Technical Communication Habits (PITCH).
Ron Harichandran is Dean of the Tagliatela College of Engineering. He led the Project to Integrate Technical Communication Habits at the Tagliatela College of Engineering. All engineering and computer science programs in the college develop technical communication skills in undergraduate students through targeted courses in all four years.
Dr. Joseph A. Levert, P.E. (M’05) is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department at the University of New Haven. He received his Ph.D. in engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and has practiced engineering in four different industries.
ABSTRACT
An instructional innovation implemented with 29 engineering students in six interdisciplinary project design teams is described. In their Senior Design courses, students develop proposals in response to requests from actual clients. Students have access to online resources specifically developed to support proposal writing (e.g., annotated sample proposals and scoring rubrics). Students submit proposal drafts to their clients who review the proposals. Feedback from clients and instructor comments are then compiled and shared with students. Within this context, the researchers (a writing instructor, the dean and senior design instructors) explore how the process of virtual collaborative revision in response to feedback from instructors and actual clients offers students opportunities for acquiring technical communication habits (Zimmerman & Kitsantas, 2002). Revisions are tracked over time and analyzed to determine how students revise proposals to address reviewers’ comments. At the end of the revision process, students are asked to report on how they used the feedback and online resources to guide revision. This study builds on previous research on a college-wide program that integrates technical communication habits into engineering courses (Harichandran et al., 2014; Erdil et al., 2016; Simson, Randi, & Becker, 2017).
REFERENCES
Harichandran, R. S., Nocito-Gobel, J., Brisart, E., Erdil, N. O., Collura, M. A., Daniels, S. B., & Adams, D. J. (2014, October). A comprehensive engineering college-wide program for developing technical communication skills in students. In Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), 2014 IEEE (pp. 1-8). IEEE.
Erdil, N. O., Harichandran, R. S., Adams, D., Collura, M. A., Nocito-Gobel, J., & Simson, A. (2016, June). Preliminary assessment of and lessons learned in PITCH: An integrated approach to developing technical communication skills in engineers. Proceedings of the ASEE Annual Conference, New Orleans, LA, Paper 14711, 21 pp.
Simson, A., Randi, J., & Becker, A.L. (2017, June). Assessing the value of different techniques for teaching technical communication skills. Proceedings of the ASEE Annual Conference, Columbus, OH, Paper 20453, 14 pp.
Zimmerman, B. J., & Kitsantas, A. (2002). Acquiring writing revision and self-regulatory skill through observation and emulation. Journal of Educational Psychology, 94(4), 660.
Randi, J., & Harichandran, R. S., & Levert, J. A., & Karimi, B. (2018, June), Improving Senior Design Proposals Through Revision by Responding to Reviewer Comments Paper presented at 2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--30633
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