Collaborating With Writing Centers on Interdisciplinary Peer Tutor Training to Improve Writing Support for Engineering Students

Abstract

Introduction: Faculty members have little time and usually lack expertise to provide writing feedback on lab reports. Sending students to a writing center, an existing resource on virtually all college campuses, could fill that gap. However, the majority of peer writing tutors are in nontechnical majors, and little research exists on training them to provide support for engineering students. Research question: Can peer writing tutors without technical backgrounds be trained to provide effective feedback to engineering students? About the case: Previously, sending students to the writing center was ineffective. The students did not see the value and the tutors did not feel capable of providing feedback to them. To remedy this situation, an interdisciplinary training method was developed collaboratively by an engineering professor and the writing center director. Situating the case: Researchers have suggested that it is

From physical to online spaces in the age of the #FeesMustFall protests: A Critical Interpretative Synthesis of writing centres in emergency situations

“…The aspect of authority (Carino 2003) could only be deduced from the positive feedback that the tutors received after using the skills from the training sessions in their tutorials. However, this is diluted by the finding that the students still preferred to receive feedback from tutors who had technical knowledge of the subject (Weissbach and Pflueger 2018). Furthermore, the research findings were based on individual reports from the students without a corresponding in-depth analysis of the effectiveness of the feedback from the tutors (Weissbach and Pflueger 2018).…”

“…With reference to effective feedback, Weissbach and Pflueger (2018) note that students are usually sent to physical writing centres to improve their work. They point out that more often than not, tutors lack the technical background required for some of the assignments that the students present.…”

“…However, this is diluted by the finding that the students still preferred to receive feedback from tutors who had technical knowledge of the subject (Weissbach and Pflueger 2018). Furthermore, the research findings were based on individual reports from the students without a corresponding in-depth analysis of the effectiveness of the feedback from the tutors (Weissbach and Pflueger 2018). It is argued that while this study pointed to the need for training, the failure to analyse the feedback leaves little that one can take from the physical writing centre to the online space.…”

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“…On the other hand, Piaget and Vygotsky also established that the practice facilitates the learning process and the lived experiences because it allows the individual to relate the new knowledge with the previous one . The trend is also directed to carry out these projects in an interdisciplinary way, with the collaboration of other dependencies or engineering departments .…”

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“…In a globalized world, multidisciplinarity has become very important, since it is difficult to imagine that the teaching-learning process can occur in isolation. The benefits of multidisciplinarity have been mentioned by authors such as [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24]. In this approach has been developed a multidisciplinary course.…”