2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Capstone design courses are attractive settings in which to teach engineering students the written communication skills they will rely upon throughout their careers. However, teaching writing alongside technical content presents several challenges to capstone design instructors, many of whom have limited experience teaching writing. Specifically, assessing writing is time consuming, and instructors find that students often fail to respond appropriately to feedback. These problems arise each semester in the J. Mike Walker ‘66 Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University. As part of their senior design capstone course, students are individually assigned a design report in which they begin documenting their design process by defining their team’s design problem. Although instructors spend considerable time providing feedback for initial drafts of the design reports, students primarily address the minor, sentence-level edits in the revised report rather than the complex organizational and content-based issues. Students’ focus on these minor edits often results in their failure to communicate a clear understanding of the design problem.

To improve the efficiency of instructors’ formative assessment, the senior design coordinator collaborated with the department’s writing lecturer to develop grading guidelines and an updated grading rubric for the report. In addition, two thirty-minute writing assessment and training workshops were conducted. During the first workshop, the writing lecturer discussed best practices in providing feedback and emphasized the classification of writing issues into two categories. During the second workshop, the writing instructor led a grade norming session during which instructors evaluated two sample design report background sections. These samples were generated using ChatGPT and edited to capture common issues, both higher- and lower-order, encountered in previous semesters’ design reports. Instructors were invited to discuss what they saw as major issues in each sample and how they would grade the samples. After the final submissions of the design reports were submitted, instructors were asked to evaluate the training provided, to describe their approach to grading the design reports, and to compare their experience grading writing prior to receiving assessment training. Findings suggest the assessment training helped instructors hone their approach to providing feedback, making the process more efficient and less time-consuming.