Mapping Institutional Values and the Technical Communication Curriculum: A Strategy for Grounding Assessment

Creating a Continuous Improvement Model for Sustaining Programs in Technical and Professional Communication

“…Even though work on assessment is one area of programmatic scholarship that is rich and ongoing (e.g., Boettger, 2010; Carnegie, 2007; Hundleby & Allen, 2010; Taylor, 2006; Yu, 2012), it has been limited to a small part of what it takes to build and sustain programs. As Meloncon and Schreiber (2017) note in their analysis of capstone courses across programs, assessment is a common practice across programs, but it does not offer a field-wide perspective.…”

“…The Gather step includes gathering together existing documentation about the program to begin to understand what is known about the program both within the department and throughout the institution The most common documents that will likely already be created are things such program outcomes, course descriptions with course outcomes, and assessment reports. Once a TPC PA has gathered the existing data, they need to work toward the following: Create a curriculum map of your program outcomes and current courses. Create a practical and conceptual skills map of current courses (see Henschel & Meloncon, 2014 for information on how to do this). Situate your program within your institutional culture (see Allen, 2010 on how to do this). …”

Latin-American writing initiatives in engineering from Spanish-speaking countries

“…Regarding assessment in technical communication programs, some scholars suggest institutional assessment of curriculum and learning outcomes according to institutional values of universities; this type of assessment can provide insights for planning (Allen, 2010). Concerning student performance and learning outcomes, assessment on "polymorphic literacy" (i.e., writing as a performance that involves both images and language) is also advised.…”

“…he U.S. scholarship has acknowledged the importance of conducting assessment of curricula and learning outcomes of the programs according to systems of values of the institutions and majors (Allen, 2010;Coppola & Elliot, 2010). In the case of the Latin-American publications analyzed, the writing advocates are already pointing out the need of conducting developmental research on students writing and genre awareness of faculty members who have been participants of the interdisciplinary writing initiatives in Engineering majors (Natale & Stagnaro, 2012;Stagnaro & Jauré, 2013).…”

Creating Professional ePortfolios in Technical Writing

“…These documents provide valuable information to programmatic assessments by verifying students' theoretical and application-based learning (Cargile Cook & Zachry, 2010;Powell & Jankovich, 1998). As educators, our ongoing challenge is to ground our curriculum in appropriate contexts that are suitable for evaluation (Allen, 2010). For academic use, eportfolios encourage students' reflections on the program; for professional use, they function as tools for employment (cf.…”