2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Technical communication is highly valued within industries that employ chemical engineering graduates, and engineering educators have long sought to integrate effective writing instruction into engineering curricula. However, many engineering undergraduates consider writing as outside the practice of engineering and resist viewing themselves as competent writers. This study examined whether writerly self-efficacy - belief in one’s ability to successfully implement writing in a specific context - could be improved by embedding writing assignments into industrially relevant scenarios that reflect professional engineering practice. Scenarios were incorporated into a two-part series of senior-level chemical engineering unit operations laboratory courses with heavy technical writing requirements, and the Post-Secondary Writerly Self-Efficacy Scale (PSWSES) was administered to three separate cohorts of engineering students at three points of contact across the two semesters of the courses.
The results showed changes across all three factors of the PSWSES. Local and Global Writing Process Knowledge, which encapsulates writerly abilities/skills, showed significant and steady increases throughout the three administrations, indicating that the students were growing as writers and were more confident in their writerly abilities. The Physical Reaction factor, a factor that captures intrapersonal traits dealing with the physical act of writing, also increased, although with a small effect size, indicating that the students may have become more comfortable with the writing process with practice. The final factor, Time and Effort, which relates to beliefs about time management and motivation, decreased steadily with a small effect size across the administrations, signaling a decrease in willingness and motivation, perhaps due to fatigue, throughout the academic year.
This study demonstrates that situated technical writing instruction contextualized within authentic, industrially relevant contexts is positively related to chemical engineering students’ confidence in the writing process within engineering contexts. Student gains in comfort with the physical aspects of writing were modest but nonetheless suggest a positive shift in their attitudes toward writing as being integral to engineering practice. The decrease in writing willingness and motivation may indicate a need for instructors to consider striking a better balance between the demands of writing with overall workload demands.