2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Impact of Learning Transfer-focused Lab Writing Modules to the Writing Instructional Materials by Engineering Lab Instructors
Presented at Joint Session: Experimentation and Laboratory-Oriented Studies Division and Civil Engineering Division
Instructors, including teaching assistants, teaching engineering lab courses are often challenged when instructing lab report writing due to a lack of available resources for supporting engineering lab report pedagogies. They are under-supported in writing pedagogies and are usually unfamiliar with the extent of students’ prior writing knowledge. Through an NSF-funded project, engineering lab writing instructional guides (engineeringlabwriting.org) were developed for instructors and undergraduates to improve lab writing by promoting undergraduates’ learning transfer from their general education writing courses to engineering labs. These web-based, learning transfer-focused engineering lab writing guides, or the guides, are distinct from other lab writing pedagogical materials because they are scaffolded from the writing knowledge that engineering students are already familiar with from general education writing courses such as first-year composition and technical writing. This study investigated how access to the guides impacted engineering lab instructors’ instructional materials. The website containing the guides was introduced to seven participating engineering lab instructors from civil, electrical, and mechanical engineering programs across three universities. We collected their lab instructional materials before (control) and after (experiment) access to the guides to compare how they were changed to support students’ lab writing. The results indicated that most instructors used the modules from the student’s guide to provide instructions on lab report format, reasoning, and conventions directly to the students. Instructors included the content from those specific modules in the lab handouts. About half of the participants used the instructor’s guide to update their lab assignments to include descriptions of the audience and their expectations. Some participants developed lab report assessment rubrics using the instructor’s guide. Although there was a variation among the materials after instructors had access to the guides, all the participating lab instructors updated their lab instructional materials to use the terms and concepts introduced in the guides and adjusted their instructional content to consider students’ prior knowledge.
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Dr. Dave Kim
http://orcid.org/https://0000-0003-1640-9030
Washington State University, Vancouver
[biography]
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Dr. Charles Riley P.E.http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7993-437X
Oregon Institute of Technology
[biography]
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Dr. John D Lynch Washington State University [biography]
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Dr. Ken Lulay P.E. University of Portland [biography]
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Dr. Sean St. Clair Oregon Institute of Technology [biography]
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