2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Despite the recognized importance of technical writing, engineering students often struggle at the start of their careers due to a disconnect between academic instruction and industry expectations for technical writing. ABET Criterion 3 outlines numerous student outcomes that should result from completing an engineering curriculum, including communicating effectively with diverse audiences, developing and conducting appropriate experiments, and analyzing and interpreting data.
In this qualitative study, a cross-sectional inductive approach was taken to determine student outcomes and perspectives when aligning lab report templates with technical writing templates provided by industry advisors. The industrial advisory board, engineering faculty, and institutional partners provided technical writing templates, and a “best-of-breeds” lab template was created for student laboratory reports. At the end of the semester, student laboratory reports and end-of-semester surveys were analyzed, and common themes were identified.
The authors conducted a pilot study in a previous academic year, which took place in an upper-level mechanical engineering laboratory course, and presented their findings at a previous engineering education conference. This paper builds upon the previously presented work, providing a new dataset from the subsequent semester that includes updated comments and student feedback from the end-of-semester survey.
The authors found that students were able to adjust to the new template and clearly understood the expectations for completing the assignments. The most significant problems arose from navigating the template and updating its routine pieces for each new assignment. Although students were less confident in the template's usefulness, it still provided exposure to the industry’s technical writing standards that they had not previously encountered. Future work will include studies in lower-level courses, as well as the addition of incentives to increase student participation in research studies.