2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The ability to communicate technical information in written, graphical, and verbal formats is an essential durable skill for engineering students to develop as undergraduates and carry forward into the workplace. The importance of technical communication skills is emphasized in the core ABET outcome “3. an ability to communicate effectively with a range of audiences.” Undergraduate engineering programs tend to adopt one of two strategies for technical writing instruction, either offering a stand-alone course that is frequently taught out-of-discipline or embedding technical communications skills within-discipline in laboratory or design classes. Despite these efforts, employers still report that novice engineers’ technical communications skills do not meet industry expectations.

Prior work by our group attempted to address this skills gap through the design and implementation of a unique stand-alone technical communications course that was specifically created for first-year mechanical engineering students and centered on multiple, industry-aligned modalities of communication. Preliminary evaluation of this new curriculum showed that students demonstrated substantive gains in self-efficacy for nearly all technical communication skills covered in the course, including synthesis of background research, graphical representation of data, basic statistical analyses, and composition of technical reports and presentations in a variety of formats.

In this paper, we will extend our prior work by examining whether the skills emphasized in this stand-alone first year course are transferred into later courses within the discipline. Specifically, we will focus on three core skill sets: (1) writing clear, concise, and coherent technical narratives; (2) graphical representation of quantitative and qualitative data sets; and (3) basic statistical analyses, including linear regressions, one-way ANOVA, and propagation of error. We will follow a single cohort of mechanical engineering students (n=147), beginning with the stand-alone technical communications course taken in the spring of their freshmen year, through their two subsequent semesters of coursework involving discipline-specific design and laboratory-based courses. For two semesters, post-course surveys will be administered to students that assess self-efficacy for the three core skill sets as well as their perceptions of the value and applicability of the first-year technical communications course in their current coursework. Also, written deliverables for a subset of students will be evaluated by faculty instructors according to established technical communications rubrics. The results of this study will be used to refine our first-year technical communications course and modify the strategies that we are using in later lab and design courses to activate prior technical communications knowledge (e.g., review exercises, exemplars, and common rubrics). More broadly, our approach to developing and reinforcing industry-aligned technical communications skills throughout our undergraduate curriculum may be of interest to other programs seeking to improve student outcomes in this area.