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Impact of Learning Transfer-focused Lab Writing Modules to the Writing Instructional Materials by Engineering Lab Instructors

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Conference

2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Portland, Oregon

Publication Date

June 23, 2024

Start Date

June 23, 2024

End Date

July 12, 2024

Conference Session

Joint Session: Experimentation and Laboratory-Oriented Studies Division and Civil Engineering Division

Tagged Divisions

Civil Engineering Division (CIVIL) and Experimentation and Laboratory-Oriented Studies Division (DELOS)

Permanent URL

https://strategy.asee.org/47559

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Paper Authors

biography

Dave Kim Washington State University, Vancouver Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0003-1640-9030

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Dr. Dave Kim is Professor and Mechanical Engineering Program Coordinator in the School of Engineering and Computer Science at Washington State University Vancouver. His teaching and research have been in the areas of engineering materials, fracture mechanics, and manufacturing processes. In particular, he has been very active in pedagogical research in the area of writing pedagogy in engineering laboratory courses. Dr. Kim and his collaborators attracted close to $1M in research grants to study writing transfer of engineering undergraduates. For technical research, he has a long-standing involvement in research concerned with the manufacturing of advanced composite materials (CFRP/titanium stack, GFRP, nanocomposites, etc.) for marine and aerospace applications. His recent research efforts have also included the fatigue behavior of manufactured products, with a focus on fatigue strength improvement of aerospace, automotive, and rail structures. He has been the author or co-author of over 200 peer-reviewed papers in these areas.

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biography

Charles Riley P.E. Oregon Institute of Technology Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-7993-437X

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Dr. Riley has been teaching mechanics concepts for over 10 years and has been honored with both the ASCE ExCEEd New Faculty Excellence in Civil Engineering Education Award (2012) and the Beer and Johnston Outstanding New Mechanics Educator Award (2013).

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biography

John D Lynch Washington State University

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John D. Lynch received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering, Cum Laude, from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City in 1979. From 1979 to 1995 he worked in the high-tech industry in California and Oregon as a computer engineer, including positions at Floati

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biography

Ken Lulay P.E. University of Portland

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BSME, University of Portland, 1984
MSME, University of Portland, 1987
PhD, University of Washington, 1990
Hyster Co., 1984-1987
Boeing 1990-1998
Associate Prof, University of Portland, Current

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biography

Sean St. Clair Oregon Institute of Technology

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Sean St.Clair is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Civil Engineering Department at Oregon Tech, where he teaches structural engineering courses and conducts research in engineering education. He is also a registered Professional Engineer.

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Abstract

Instructors, including teaching assistants, teaching engineering lab courses are often challenged when instructing lab report writing due to a lack of available resources for supporting engineering lab report pedagogies. They are under-supported in writing pedagogies and are usually unfamiliar with the extent of students’ prior writing knowledge. Through an NSF-funded project, engineering lab writing instructional guides (engineeringlabwriting.org) were developed for instructors and undergraduates to improve lab writing by promoting undergraduates’ learning transfer from their general education writing courses to engineering labs. These web-based, learning transfer-focused engineering lab writing guides, or the guides, are distinct from other lab writing pedagogical materials because they are scaffolded from the writing knowledge that engineering students are already familiar with from general education writing courses such as first-year composition and technical writing. This study investigated how access to the guides impacted engineering lab instructors’ instructional materials. The website containing the guides was introduced to seven participating engineering lab instructors from civil, electrical, and mechanical engineering programs across three universities. We collected their lab instructional materials before (control) and after (experiment) access to the guides to compare how they were changed to support students’ lab writing. The results indicated that most instructors used the modules from the student’s guide to provide instructions on lab report format, reasoning, and conventions directly to the students. Instructors included the content from those specific modules in the lab handouts. About half of the participants used the instructor’s guide to update their lab assignments to include descriptions of the audience and their expectations. Some participants developed lab report assessment rubrics using the instructor’s guide. Although there was a variation among the materials after instructors had access to the guides, all the participating lab instructors updated their lab instructional materials to use the terms and concepts introduced in the guides and adjusted their instructional content to consider students’ prior knowledge.

Kim, D., & Riley, C., & Lynch, J. D., & Lulay, K., & St. Clair, S. (2024, June), Impact of Learning Transfer-focused Lab Writing Modules to the Writing Instructional Materials by Engineering Lab Instructors Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. https://strategy.asee.org/47559

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