2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The development of technical writing skills plays a major role in any engineer’s training. The act of organizing thoughts in a written format helps students solidify concepts covered in the classroom and may continue the learning process as students uncover areas they did not fully understand previously. Additionally, strong communication skills are highly sought after by employers. Despite this, many traditional engineering courses that employ technical writing assignments fail to give students the space to reflect upon and improve their writing. Furthermore, students are often dissuaded from further engaging in the writing process due to time constraints and lack of grading incentives. The repercussions are two-fold: (1) students may not view technical writing as a critical skill worth improving, compared to other technical skills, and (2) students may develop an adversarial relationship with writing assignment due to relatively subjective evaluation. We posit that allowing students to resubmit assignments to improve their grade addresses these repercussions and improves self-efficacy, while reducing anxiety.

The courses evaluated in this preliminary study were bioengineering laboratory courses where technical writing assignments comprise over 80% of the final grade and a resubmission policy was employed. This resubmission policy allowed students to resubmit writing assignments one additional time for up to 100% of the points back. To assess students’ self-efficacy and anxiety, a course survey was given at the start and end of the semester, where students evaluated statements related to self-efficacy and anxiety on a 5-point Likert scale. Pre- and post-course survey results were paired by individual student, anonymized, and filtered for completed surveys (n = 22). Using the Kruskal-Wallis test for ranked non-parametric data, the results were analyzed for any differences between pre- and post-course scores. These methods were reviewed and approved by an institutional review board.

Results indicate that assignment resubmission improved students’ self-efficacy and reduced anxiety. In assessing statements related to self-efficacy, such as “I am confident I understand topics [in this course]” and “I believe I can master skills [in this course]”, a significant positive difference was seen in the post-course scores (p < 0.001). A reduction in anxiety-related scores was found for low-complexity and high-complexity course-specific tasks (p < 0.001 and p = 0.003, respectively). Qualitative responses from students explicitly acknowledged the positive role the resubmission policy played in the quality of their work. Future steps include assessing more courses over a greater range of topics and levels, as well as evaluating the effect, if any, of resubmission on underrepresented groups in engineering to see if these policies improve classroom equity.