Scaffolding Technical Writing Within a First-Year Engineering Lab Experience

Abstract This complete evidence-based practice paper will report on the development and results of a scaffolded approaching to teaching first-year engineering students technical writing skills throughout various laboratory experiences and subsequent assignments over the course of a semester. The need for engineers to be proficient in the communication of technical content has been reiterated many times over in publications and calls for action from engineering industry leaders (e.g. 1, 2) and engineering educators (e.g. 3, 4). The identification of technical communication as a continual weakness of graduating engineers has been addressed in a variety of way across engineering programs. For example, universities have introduced assignments and projects focused on technical communication skills into courses across engineering curricula (e.g. 5, 6). This paper will focus specifically on the integration of the technical communication into a first-year engineering course's laboratory component by way of scaffolded technical writing assignments. Scaffolding as an educational tool is used to reduce the complexity of tasks and help students focus practice and build component skills 7, 8. Scaffolding has been shown to be successful in improving student learning at multiple education levels and across various subjects (e.g. 9, 10, 11). Scaffolding also allows for additional opportunities for students to receive feedback on their practice of component skills, which has been identified in literature as beneficial to student learning 8. This scaffolded approach to writing has been utilized in other contexts with success (e.g. 12), but this paper will explore the use of a scaffolding approach to learning technical writing across various engineering laboratory experiences. These experiences are designed to introduce students to basic engineering principles through the data collection, data analysis, and discussion around engineering experiments and designs. Scaffolding was integrated into the students' laboratory experiences through writing separate sections of a lab report before being asked to write a full report. A new report section was introduced to students approximately every other week, discussing expectations of the section and having them fully write out that section in their assignment. To continue framing each assignment as a lab report, students had to answer questions across all sections of a lab report to give them experience in seeing what information belongs in what section. Throughout the semester, each section was focused on during one of the labs and teaching assistants provided feedback on the assignment with focus on providing detailed feedback on the writing section. Students were given an opportunity after each of these assignments to review the feedback received and make corrections to the writing section. Additionally, this correction submission asked students to reflect on the feedback they received, how they used it to make changes, and what they learned from that specific assignment that they can continue to apply to future technical writing. Toward the end of the semester, students were asked to write two full lab reports, integrating their skills from the individual sections into a full report and using feedback on the first full report to improve upon their skills for the second. By scaffolding technical writing assignments over the course of multiple engineering labs and providing correct and return opportunities to students for each of the scaffolded submissions, a learning environment was created that allows students to develop component skills and implement feedback through lower-stakes assignments. Using this new technical writing assignment structure, it is anticipated that students will spend less time on smaller technical writing assignments early in the semester developing technical writing skills and also spend less time on full lab report assignments at the end of the semester being more comfortable with the skills already developed up to that point. It is also anticipated that by the end of the semester, students will demonstrate greater levels of mastery with regards to technical writing than in previous years, as they were given lower stakes assignments as opportunities for targeted practice and encouraged to implement clear and detailed feedback early and often. References 1 F. Gurcan and C. Kose, "Analysis of software engineering industry needs and trends: Implications for education," Int. J. Eng. Educ., vol. 33, no. 4, pp. 1361–1368, 2017. 2 J. A. Donnell, B. M. Aller, M. Alley, and A. A. 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