Engineering Faculty on Writing: What They Think and What They Want

Abstract

Writing has been identified as an important skill for engineers. While faculty generally agree that writing should be included in the engineering curriculum, there are many barriers that may discourage them from bringing writing into their classes. Through development and deployment of a survey, the authors investigated instructor perceptions of writing in engineering. More specifically, this paper reports results from a survey (n=53 responses) administered to instructors in the College of Engineering at Purdue University, a large doctoral university with very high research activity in the Midwestern United States. The survey first asked respondents to report on the extent to which they incorporate writing in one of their recent undergraduate courses, including types of assignments and use of related tools and practices. A second major section of the survey probed instructor perceptions of student writing skills, while also asking about reasons for -and challenges associated with -incorporating writing in engineering classes. The final parts of the survey ask respondents to identify specific resources that might help them expand inclusion of writing in their courses, followed by a series of demographic questions to better characterize the participant population. Most generally, the survey results suggest that faculty recognize the need for and importance of writing in engineering, which is in part reflected in their own courses. However, they continue to perceive challenges associated with including writing in engineering courses, with a particular emphasis on various resource constraints. The paper concludes with a brief overview of next steps, including plans for developing supporting resources for faculty and students and collecting survey data from multiple institutions.

Peer Review and Reflection in Engineering Labs: Writing to Learn and Learning to Write

“…This finding aligns to previous research showing that students expect to write primarily for the teacher, which in turn erodes the authenticity of writing activities [26]. In a survey of faculty perceptions about writing, faculty tended to view students as able to write for appropriate audiences [18].…”

“…Managing grading and feedback is a significant challenge for engineering faculty who teach courses that include writing [18]. One approach to alleviate this is to train graduate TAs [19].…”

Writing Across Engineering: A Collaborative Approach to Support STEM Faculty’s Integration of Writing Instruction in their Classes

“…Despite the emphasis placed by the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET) on developing engineering students' mastery of communication skills [1], we found a number of obstacles to teaching these skills in our engineering courses, including large class sizes, lack of faculty and teaching-assistant (TA) training in teaching or grading writing, widely varying opinions about what constitutes "good" writing, and already crowded individual course content and departmental curricula [2]. Similar obstacles have been reported at other institutions [3].…”

“…Our approach is aligned with the notion of transdisciplinary (or transdisciplinary action) research (TDAR) 3 . We use "transdisciplinary" as it is related to our methodology for action-based intervention within varying departments in the College of Engineering.…”