2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Technical communication skills are vital for engineering students to develop over the course of their academic careers. At The Ohio State University, technical communication is particularly emphasized in senior design capstone courses when students are preparing to enter their professional careers. Students have many opportunities to improve and practice their skills through project team meetings, presentations to a range of audiences and for varied purposes, written design documents and reports and status memos, all of which receive detailed feedback from their instructor. At Ohio State, the instructors of these courses are typically non-tenured track faculty with industry experience with limited formal training in technical communications. Noting the importance of these skills, the Multidisciplinary Design Capstone program implemented a co-teaching model, adding a technical communications faculty member to the instructional team with the goal of strengthening technical communications student outcomes and serving as a pilot for possible future iterations of the co-teaching model. This model involved review and revision of course materials (assignments, rubrics, and lecture materials) and integrated the technical communications faculty into class lectures and assignment grading. The integrated faculty created a research study to evaluate the impact of this model on students and their submitted work.

The research study is a multi-year curriculum study, beginning with the 2020-2021 academic year, involving this newly implemented model of co-teaching Multidisciplinary Design Capstone course sequence with an embedded faculty member from the department’s Engineering Technical Communications unit. This collaborative effort is meant as an innovative and proactive effort to provide students with additional instruction in technical/professional communication, alongside their capstone experience, while providing opportunities for students to iteratively practice and receive feedback on their communication skills throughout this two-semester capstone course sequence. The research study involves an evaluation of students’ perceptions of their technical communication as well as evaluating students’ submitted work.

Research consistently demonstrates that sustained, iterative practice in writing/communication skills strengthens not only the communication skills, but also students’ knowledge transfer and critical thinking skills. Further, we know there is industry demand for graduates with both technical and professional skills who can put those skills to immediate use in their careers.
The participating faculty hypothesize that this co-teaching model will result in a strengthening of student writing/communication outcomes while also demonstrating the interdisciplinarity skillset students will require in their careers.

This work in progress paper will explore initial data collected from students regarding their perception of their progress in technical communication skills throughout the two-semester Multidisciplinary Design Capstone course sequence.