2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The continued struggle to improve student technical writing skills in STEM disciplines is well documented. Solutions have been proposed, implemented, and inconsistently sustained. One approach to improving disciplinary technical writing is through Writing Assignment Tutor Training in STEM (WATTS). WATTS is an interdisciplinary, collaborative approach in which STEM faculty work with writing centers and generalist tutors to provide just-in-time assignment-specific feedback to students. WATTS research was funded by an NSF IUSE collaborative grant (award #s 2013467, 2013496, & 2013541). In WATTS, the STEM instructor collaborates with the writing center supervisor and prepares materials for the tutor-training including assignment examples, a glossary of terms, areas of concern, and the assignment learning outcomes.
Among other benefits, WATTS has shown statistically significant outcomes towards improving student technical writing [1]. Tutors provide specific, appropriate feedback to the students during the tutoring sessions. However, one area that remains a challenge is engaging students in the process of revising and implementing that feedback in their writing process. An important next step is to find new ways to engage students in the revision process so they can effectively use the feedback they receive from multiple interdisciplinary audiences and begin to internalize the benefits of the revision process.
Here, we begin the work of increasing student engagement with a multi-pronged approach to revision. Students begin by assessing their own work with the assignment grading rubric and instructor materials to identify areas for potential improvement. The instructor, using the materials prepared for the WATTS tutor-training, provides feedback on areas of concern. Students then visit the writing center to get individual peer feedback. Finally, students create a plan that combines the varied feedback sources for revising their writing. This allows students to engage at multiple stages and take ownership of their revision process.
This work-in-progress paper discusses an interdisciplinary approach to fostering student engagement in the iterative revision process. We used Kang et al.’s Design-Based Change Model (DBCM) [2] as a framework to envision, plan, implement, and sustain practices in institutional contexts for WATTS implementation. Next steps include piloting this approach in the classroom to provide a more engaging iterative revision process and comparing the number and types of revisions completed in the writing.