2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Industrial engineering capstone courses provide students the opportunity to apply the technical tools they learn in their major classes to a real-world project. To effectively demonstrate understanding of learning objectives, students must communicate clearly to a wide range of audiences, including instructors, other team members, and the project client. Full assessment of learning objectives may require engineering professors teaching capstone courses to spend considerable time evaluating student writing. Varied teaching tools and methods to convey the importance of communication in professional environments may also be incorporated to enhance student learning. Clear communication within an engineering capstone course is important for students and engineering instructors.  

The work in progress describes an effort to improve communication and assessment of student learning in an industrial engineering capstone course. To better assess learning objectives, several changes were made to the curriculum over a four-year period. The changes include the development of a course guide, updated rubrics, project charter discussions, teamwork assessments, midterm check-ins, and the experimentation with different final presentation formats. Despite these changes, assessment of student learning outcomes remained elusive as most of their analysis and understanding was conveyed through written deliverables. For teams that struggled with written communication, we could never quite understand their work, let alone whether they were doing it well. In 2023, a writing instructor was integrated into the class to help students better communicate their understanding of the problem, methods, and solutions. The contribution of the writing instructor has addressed several of the communication challenges that other innovations were attempting to solve. Moreover, and to our surprise, our assessment issues began to improve. Preliminary results indicate that the addition of formative assessments have helped students better communicate the problem and solution to a wider audience in their project deliverables. A revised instructional model is presented, along with future evaluation plans.