2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Graduates from ABET accredited engineering programs are expected to demonstrate an ability to communicate effectively. Technical writing skills are particularly difficult to teach and even more time consuming to assess, often limiting the number of opportunities students are given to practice and improve writing skills throughout their undergraduate education. This study expands upon our rubric-driven approach for teaching and assessing technical writing in multiple upper-level biomedical engineering laboratory courses. In each lab course, students are provided a detailed rubric outlining the requirements for a full technical paper. Students are then permitted one revision and re-submission opportunity, during which they can address deficiencies in their writing as indicated by the graduate teaching assistants’ (GTA) feedback. As next steps in the work-in-progress, a survey has been developed to measure students’ perceptions on the impacts of the writing cycle on the technical writing skills. Although data collection from the survey is ongoing, the preliminary results from autumn 2018 and spring 2019 semesters will be collected, analyzed, and shared. We anticipate that student survey responses will identify key insight on: confusing steps in the writing cycle; grading inconsistencies; effectiveness of feedback from the rubric or GTA; and student confidence in writing future technical reports with and without the rubric. Our previous analyses provided a quantitative means for assessing students’ improvement in their abilities to communicate effectively. These new student survey responses are expected to identify key areas for improvement in the writing cycle, as well as potentially validate the overall effectiveness of our rubric-driven technical writing cycle.