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Communication Across Divisions: Trends Emerging from the 2019 Annual Conference of ASEE and Some Possibilities for Strategic Action

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Conference

2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

Location

Virtual On line

Publication Date

June 22, 2020

Start Date

June 22, 2020

End Date

June 26, 2021

Conference Session

Promoting Communication Skills

Tagged Division

Liberal Education/Engineering & Society

Page Count

16

DOI

10.18260/1-2--34304

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/34304

Download Count

377

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Paper Authors

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Kathryn A. Neeley University of Virginia

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Kathryn Neeley is Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society in the Engineering & Society Department of the School of Engineering and Applied Science. She is a past chair of the Liberal Education/Engineering & Society Division of ASEE and is particularly interested in the role of liberal education in developing engineering leaders.

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Judith Shaul Norback Georgia Institute of Technology

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Biography
Judith Shaul Norback, PhD, is academic faculty and Director of Workplace and Academic Communication in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. She applies her skills as a social psychologist to gather data from executives about stellar presentations and other oral communication skills and she conducts research on communication, to improve instruction for both undergraduates and PhD students. Dr. Norback has developed and provided instruction for students in industrial and biomedical engineering and has advised on oral communication instruction at other universities. Since she founded the Presentation Coaching Program in 2003, the coaching has had over 41,000 student visits. As of winter 2015, she shared her instructional materials, including a scoring system evaluated for reliability, with over 400 schools from the U.S., Australia, Germany, and South Korea. Dr. Norback has studied communication and other basic skills in the workplace and developed curriculum over the past 30 years—first at Educational Testing Service; then as part of the Center for Skills Enhancement, Inc., which she founded, with clients including the U.S. Department of Labor, the National Skill Standards Board, and universities. Since arriving at Georgia Tech in 2000 her work has focused on oral communication for engineering students and engineers. Dr. Norback has published over 20 articles in the past decade alone, in the ASEE Annual Conference Proceedings, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, INFORMS Transactions on Education, and the International Journal of Engineering Education, and others. She authored the book Oral Communication Excellence for Engineers and Scientists, published in summer 2013. Over the past 15 years Dr. Norback has given over 40 conference presentations and workshops at nation-wide conferences such as ASEE, where she has served as chair of the Liberal Education/Engineering & Society (LEES) Division. She has been an officer for the Education Forum of INFORMS and has served as Associate Chair for the National Capstone Design Conference. Dr. Norback has a Bachelors’ degree from Cornell University and a Masters and PhD from Princeton University. Her current research interests include 1) clarifying the effectiveness of video distribution and the use of exit tickets in oral communication instruction for engineers, 2) identifying the mental models engineering students use when creating graphical representations, and 3) learning the trends and themes represented in the communication-related papers across various divisions of ASEE. As part of this effort, Norback is working with Kay Neeley of U of VA to start an ASEE Communication across Divisions Community, now numbering 80 people.

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Charlie Bennett Georgia Institute of Technology

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Charlie Bennett is the Public Engagement Librarian for Georgia Tech, working with Georgia Tech faculty and students to present their scholarship and creative work to the general public through popular media, usually providing production, technical, and teaching assistance for radio and podcasting projects. He has earned Bachelor of Science degrees in Economics (1998) and Science, Technology, Culture (2000) from Georgia Tech and a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science from Valdosta State University (2011), and co-hosts the “research-library rock’n’roll radio show” called Lost in the Stacks on WREK Atlanta.

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Benjamin J. Laugelli University of Virginia

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Dr. Laugelli is an Assistant Professor of Engineering and Society at the University of Virginia. He teaches courses that explore social and ethical aspects of engineering design and practice, including Science, Technology, and Contemporary Issues; Technology and the Frankenstein Myth; The LEGO Course: Engineering Design and Values; STS and Engineering Practice; and The Engineer, Ethics, and Professional Responsibility.

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Abstract

Abstract This paper extends an effort begun in 2015 to create a comprehensive and holistic view of communication as that subject is treated across the divisions of ASEE based on analysis of all of the papers on communication that were published in the proceedings of the 2019 Annual Conference. The quantitative results of the analysis reveal increases in the (1) total number of papers on communication (67 in 2019 vs. 33 in 2015), (2) number of divisions sponsoring papers on communication (20 in 2019 vs. 15 in 2015), (3) number of sessions with all or most papers focusing on communication (13 in 2019 vs. 6 in 2015). Taken together, the quantitative results demonstrate that interest in communication is both growing and dispersed across ASEE. Qualitative analysis of the papers focused on the backgrounds and institutional affiliations of the authors and trends with respect to the focus, scope, and funding of the work reported in the papers. The 2019 papers demonstrated the intensification, diversification, and evolution of four trends that were evident in 2015 : (1) disciplinary and workplace communication, (2) communication tasks as a way to simultaneously develop communication competency and subject matter mastery, (3) interdisciplinary integration and multi-institutional collaboration, and (4) collecting large amounts of data about student outcomes in a single course or institution with relatively little effort devoted to synthesizing experiences across institutions. The paper concludes by enumerating strategies LEES might implement in collaboration with other divisions and ASEE headquarters to develop a Communication across Divisions Network to efficiently and effectively advance teaching, research, and practice in communication in engineering.

Neeley, K. A., & Norback, J. S., & Bennett, C., & Laugelli, B. J. (2020, June), Communication Across Divisions: Trends Emerging from the 2019 Annual Conference of ASEE and Some Possibilities for Strategic Action Paper presented at 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual On line . 10.18260/1-2--34304

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2020 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015