2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In an engineering landscape increasingly defined by complex collaborative projects at the cross-sections of various disciplines, the imperative for effective communication across disciplinary boundaries has become a cornerstone of professional competence. Past research establishes a clear consensus from both industry and accrediting bodies that engineers must be capable of communicating with a range of audiences, a skill often lacking in graduates who have taken an engineering programme with traditional curricula. What is lacking is the ability to communicate across disciplines, in other words, interdisciplinary communication competencies. An analysis of different approaches used to build interdisciplinary competencies in engineers revealed that they fell short in building interdisciplinary communication competencies in engineering students. The assumption of these different pedagogical approaches was that engineers should be able to easily communicate across disciplines while remaining firmly embedded within their own disciplinary framework. What they failed to consider was that this ‘firm embedding in one’s discipline’ would become the barrier for an engineer to understand the outlook of other disciplines and develop a vocabulary which would enable them to reach out to stakeholders from other disciplines. How should interdisciplinary communication competencies be developed in discipline-based engineering students? As engineering communication scholars increasingly recognise that successful technical communication cannot be achieved through simple information delivery, this paper proposes a novel four-step science communication training approach for developing interdisciplinary competencies in undergraduate engineering students. The first step was to teach engineering students the art of writing science communication articles for non-technical audiences. The framework and process of writing science communication pieces were taught as part of an academic writing course. In this course, 230 engineering students were taught to translate technical concepts and write a piece for a non-expert audience. Secondly, after they were taught in a workshop-style class session, in small group tutorials, the students were given an opportunity to write science communication pieces on a topic of their choice, ranging from psychology to Gen-AI application, in front of their tutor, who would continually review and give feedback on the writing. The third step was for a science communication expert to review the first drafts and offer three personal sessions of writing mentorship to develop the piece into a publishable final draft. The final step was to pitch the piece to regional newspapers and have them published in the public domain if they met the editorial criteria. Initial findings reveal that engineering students, by taking the science communication training, were able to develop a variety of interdisciplinary communication competencies, such as (a) audience analysis, (b) linguistic flexibility, (c) narrative flow and (d) persuasive writing skills. Based on these findings, we propose that science communication training is an effective way for developing interdisciplinary communication competencies in engineering students, which enables them to communicate meaningfully beyond their home disciplines.