2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The purpose of this practice paper is to suggest an equitable practice in writing-intensive engineering labs. There is an increasing interest in integrating communication into technical engineering courses. In the early 2000s, The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) set effective communication as one of the evaluation criteria for engineering programs. However, engineering students and lab instructors tend to focus more on technical knowledge rather than communication skills in the labs. Therefore, a writing-intensive lab course can simultaneously improve students’ disciplinary writing and technical knowledge.

Students’ readiness to write engineering lab reports varies depending on their previous educational experiences (Clair et al., 2021). Because of the wide variety of writing backgrounds that students bring to the engineering lab, teaching writing in engineering labs requires explicit focus on rhetorical and writing issues (Clair et al., 2021; Riley et al., 2021). This emphasis in teaching facilitates engineering thinking in the real world (Bucciarelli, 2009), and opens the learning barriers for students who use diverse languages (Lorimer Leonard and Nowacek, 2016), in particular first generation students and multilingual students. Compared with traditional writing intensive pedagogies, the writing-intensive lab course in engineering provides students with opportunities to develop genre awareness and flexibility in writing based on specific disciplinary contexts (Renna et al., 2022).

Academic literacy practices mediate the development of disciplinary expertise in engineering thinking (Geisler, 1994). One of the challenges of teaching engineering students is supporting their efforts to successfully transfer learning from one context to another. Students often struggle to think about their writing work in lab contexts beyond their individual experience of completing the lab (Poe et al, 2010), making it difficult for students to develop metacognition about how literacy in one practice relates to another. To respond to this limitation, Lane et al., (2022) showed evidence that reasoning diagrams could be used as effective instructional tools to help students explicitly integrate subject matter knowledge with rhetorical, genre, and writing procedural knowledge. They developed diagrams in several science and engineering disciplines (e.g. Materials Science and Engineering, Computer systems) through interviews with experts and article analysis. Our study replicates their approach but develops a novel reasoning diagram for the field of mechanical engineering (ME).

This paper presents the reasoning diagram for ME that we developed out of our interview study with experts in this field. In this study, we conducted two-sets of 60 minute semi-structured interviews with seven ME professors at a midwestern research intensive university. The interviews focused on these experts’ research narratives. Using a discourse-based interview approach, we collected reasoning diagrams from each individual. Our findings illustrated the iterative process of developing the reasoning diagram. We coded the interviews and analyzed the participants’ diagrams in order to develop a general reasoning diagram which we present in this paper. Discussion will suggest ways of introducing the diagram to students and talk about the implications of using the diagram as a teaching tool, including facilitating students’ engineering thinking, supporting the transfer of learning, and opening up barriers for education.