Free ticketed event
Engineering students love labs, but they struggle with lab report writing. Lab instructors are professional writers, but they are challenged when instructing writing to undergraduates, mainly due to a lack of training and resources. Lab-report writing is critical for engineering programs to engage students in experiments (ABET outcome 6) and communication (ABET outcome 3). Workshop participants will be introduced to engineering lab-writing guides developed by a cross-disciplinary team of engineering and writing faculty supported by an NSF IUSE Level 2 grant. The guides, published at engineeringlabwriting.org, are novel because they encourage writing transfer by connecting lab-writing instruction to students’ prior writing experience. The modules consist of two parts: 1) an instructor’s guide focusing on lab assignments and assessment and 2) a student’s guide supporting lab-writing outcomes. The guides have been used for the last three years at five schools in the Pacific Northwest to prove their effectiveness in improving engineering undergraduates’ lab-report writing in entry-level engineering laboratory courses. Users commonly testify to improving their lab-writing pedagogy and student performance while reducing their lab assessment time.
The workshop offers small group activities, including the following:
1. Developing an engineering lab-report assignment
2. Improving an engineering lab-report assessment
3. Guiding students in navigating writing with Generative AI (ChatGPT)
4. Training lab-teaching assistants or lab-report graders
Participants will work through the guides in small groups to design and develop sample labs, discuss the issues related to lab writing and how to deliver the instructor’s lab-writing expectations, and learn to provide feedback to students clearly and concisely. All workshop speakers are current/past PIs on multiple NSF grants, and this workshop is based on lab-writing educational research conducted over the past ten years.
Dr. Riley has been teaching mechanics concepts for over 15 years and has been honored with both the ASCE ExCEEd New Faculty Excellence in Civil Engineering Education Award (2012) and the Beer and Johnston Outstanding New Mechanics Educator Award (2013). While he teaches freshman to graduate-level courses across the civil engineering curriculum, his focus is on engineering mechanics. He implements classroom demonstrations at every opportunity as part of a complete instructional strategy that seeks to address student conceptual understanding.
Dr. Dave Kim is Professor and Mechanical Engineering Program Coordinator in the School of Engineering and Computer Science at Washington State University Vancouver. His teaching and research have been in the areas of engineering materials and manufacturing processes. In particular, he has been very active in pedagogical research in the area of writing pedagogy in engineering laboratory courses. Dr. Kim and his collaborators attracted close to $1M in research grants to study writing transfer of engineering undergraduates. For technical research, he has a long-standing involvement in research concerned with the manufacturing of advanced composite materials (CFRP/titanium stack, GFRP, nanocomposites, etc.) for aerospace and marine applications. Dr. Kim authored over 200 peer-reviewed papers in these areas. He has won numerous awards, including the 2021 Washington State University Vancouver Chancellor’s Award for Research Excellence. He has chaired the ASEE Manufacturing Division, the SME Portland Chapter, and the Southwest Washington MESA Executive Board. He received his B.S. and M.S. in Mechanical Design at Sungkyunkwan University, Korea, and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering in 2002 from the University of Washington, Seattle.
Dr. Ken Lulay is the Margaret and Vincent Aquino Endowed Associate Professor in Engineering at the University of Portland. He has been teaching mechanical and general engineering at UP for over 25 years. He has taught numerous lecture, laboratory and project-based courses in mechanics of materials and design. He has a keen interest in developing effective pedagogical practices and is involved with pedagogical research in engineering report writing. Prior to his career in academia, Dr. Lulay was a design engineer at Hyster corporation for three years, and a manufacturing research and development engineer at Boing for eight years.
Dr. Lynch is a Professor of Electrical Engineering in the School of Engineering and Computer Science at Washington State University Vancouver. He developed and taught eleven new electrical engineering courses at WSU, seven with labs. From 2002 to 2009 he was an instructor in the School of Science and Engineering of Oregon Health & Science University, where he developed and taught five new graduate computer engineering courses. He has also taught invited short courses on integrated circuit design at Halmstad University, Sweden (2003), and Shanghai Research Center for Integrated Circuit Design, China (2004). From 1979 to 2002 he held engineering and management positions in the aerospace, computer system, and semiconductor industries in Oregon and California. He received his B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Utah in 1979, and his Ph.D. from Oregon Health and Science University in 2009.
Dr. Wendy Olson is Associate Professor of English at Washington State University Vancouver, where she serves as the Director of Composition and Writing Assessment. She received her MA in English from Western Washington University and her PhD in rhetoric and composition from Washington State University. A writing studies specialist, her current research and publications primarily focuses on writing transfer, writing across the curriculum, and writing in the disciplines. Olson teaches courses in first-year composition and technical and professional writing at the undergraduate level, as well as courses in contemporary theories of composition and rhetorical theory at the graduate level. She has collaborated with colleagues on multiple writing transfer and STEM-related research projects.
Franny Howes (e/em/eirs) is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the Oregon Institute of Technology (Oregon Tech), where e serves as chair and teaches technical writing and digital media courses. E received eir PhD in Rhetoric and Writing from Virginia Tech, a MA in Digital Rhetoric and Professional Writing from Michigan State University, and a BA in Social Relations from James Madison College at Michigan State University. Dr. Howes studies communicating with comics, gender-neutral pronouns, writing in engineering, disability graphic memoir praxis, social entrepreneurship, and contemporary diversity and equity models in higher education. E also conducts collaborative research and development with eir students on educational game and app design learning experiences.