2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Introduction and Motivation
Technical communication focuses on conveying scientific information in a clear and concise way. In preparing engineering students for the workforce, many upper-level engineering courses require students to complete technical writing assignments like lab reports, scientific posters, and oral presentations(1). These approaches not only test recall, understanding, and application of course material, but also help students analyze and evaluate data and/or primary literature(2). While important experiences, communication-based assignments are challenging for students. They are evaluated qualitatively and often use task-focused rubrics, which are essential for efficient and multi-grader agreement(3). However, this leads to students focusing on producing work that fits specifications instead of on skill development. To help students develop writing as a skill, our course has implemented “scaffolding” for students as they write lab reports.

Scaffolding was first introduced by Wood and colleagues in 1976(4) to describe creating support within an assignment to enhance student performance. In general, it is meant to decrease cognitive load for learners and additionally help students accomplish tasks in the present while improving performance in the future(5). Broadly, scaffolding has been used across disciplines and student level, and it is for this reason that we believe it can be applied to technical writing. A core strategy in scaffolding is to reduce assistance over time, allowing students to progressively grow skills and build independent mastery(6,7). “Scaffold fading”, as implemented by Chang and colleagues(7), supports this framework by reducing the amount of support given to students in subsequent assignments. In this study, scaffold fading was found to be an improvement over the control group(7).

Here, we describe a “diminishing scaffold” in conjunction with high-feedback grading on lab reports. Our goal is to interrogate if providing high feedback and diminishing scaffolds for lab reports leads to higher quality lab reports at the end of the semester, and if students’ perceptions of their writing skill is improved by this support.

Methods
This study takes place in a required biomaterials course with four laboratory experiences. Students work in teams to complete experiments and then complete independent lab reports in which they analyze data and use their findings to provide recommendations on biomedical device design.

Two aspects are scaffolded – first, the protocol is set up as a worksheet with guiding questions, prompts, and space to sketch/brainstorm figures. It is set up to inform their data analysis, discussion, and figure generation in the report. Worksheets are graded for effort and the teaching team leaves detailed feedback to help students as they write their lab reports. The number of questions and associated points on the worksheet decreases from the first lab (many required questions, thirty points) to the last lab (few optional questions, zero points).

The complementary scaffold is for the lab report. These are suggested/optional outlines for the written report. The scaffold for the first lab is detailed and suggests specific, key, topics to expound on in the introduction and discussion sections. It also features suggested figure captions and styles and example phrasing for objectives and procedure sections. The scaffold becomes more general in the second lab, focusing on themes to cover instead of exact topics to discuss. In the third lab, the scaffold is even more generalized, with some sections (procedure, objectives, conclusion) blank, and other sections suggesting that students write about material-nonspecific concepts. The last lab’s scaffold is blank. The teaching team provides detailed feedback and returns reports quickly to ensure continuous improvement. As scaffold support decreases, the points associated with the report increase (first: 20 points, last: 50 points), such that the total score for each lab is out of 50 points.

After submitting the lab report, students complete a self-reflection including two likert-style and four free-response questions. Likert-type questions include “I was able to follow the protocol for this lab” and “I feel confident that I can write a lab report”. Free-response questions ask students to share the “muddiest point and their most/least favorite aspects of the lab.

This work was approved by [INSTITUTION] IRB under protocol #2024-0218. Primary outcomes will include scores on each report, responses to the Likert-type questions, and coding of free-response questions. Secondary outcome measures include trends in lab report scores across reports to determine the impact of continuous feedback and reflection and trends in student confidence over time.

Future Plans
Spring 2024 data has been collected and analysis is in progress. Fall 2024 data is currently being collected. Through this study, we hope to develop best practices in teaching technical writing for long-term skill development.