2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This work-in-progress paper describes the development of a technical writing curriculum in a cornerstone design course taught at a large private university. In the course, students complete a series of laboratory exercises and a semester-long design project with the mentorship of an engineering instructor, writing instructor, and a near-peer mentor. Writing is a major component of the students’ assessment in the course; over the course of the semester, students complete individual and team reports evaluated for grammar, style, and the scientific validity of the students’ work. The goal of these assignments is to introduce students to the practice of scientific writing in preparation for writing assignments that they will encounter in upper level STEM courses and in their professional careers. In this work, we present an ongoing effort to develop a technical writing curriculum that scaffolds students’ writing practices from the first-year through the fourth-year, in partnership with other academic departments.

The curriculum presented was developed in response to an assessment of our program’s writing instruction, in which previous students and faculty were surveyed and interviewed about their experiences with writing in their degree programs. The students, who were all previous students of the cornerstone design course, were asked to share (1) what technical writing skills students attained from the course (2) the kinds of technical writing they have done in their other undergraduate STEM courses and (3) which technical writing skills they felt required more instruction. The faculty, who represented academic departments who require the cornerstone design course as part of their degree programs, were asked to share (1) what technical skills they expected students to have by the time they enter the course (2) how they evaluated writing assignments in their course and (3) like our students, which technical writing skills they felt required more instruction. We present key findings from this investigation, which revealed to us that most students, while having a positive experience with writing in the course, felt somewhat overwhelmed by writing technical documentation, a skill they had not practiced prior to college; and many of them reported that beyond the first-year, they did not write in most of their upper level STEM courses. Many faculty acknowledged the importance of writing as a skill, but reported that they do not feel confident in their ability to teach or grade technical writing and that there are few resources available within the institution to support their writing instruction. These findings recontextualized the objectives of our technical writing curriculum.

The technical writing component of our course is now focused more on teaching students a technical writing mindset, broadly applicable to the kinds of writing they might do in their upper level courses or elsewhere; and scaffolding writing assignments in order to help students learn to break down writing assignments into smaller, more manageable chunks. We have created a community of practice with faculty who participated in our focus group, with the goal of aligning our instructional practices and sharing resources related to technical writing. In this paper, we detail the results of our initial assessment, outline the curriculum and resources we have developed, and present discuss the impact of our curriculum revisions on student learning.