Session S2B
TEACHING COLLABORATIVE WRITING AND PEER REVIEW
TECHNIQUES TO ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY UNDERGRADUATES
Stephanie Nelson, Ph.D. 1
Abstract - A recent survey of engineering professionals
found that they spent 44% of their time writing, and almost
all sometimes wrote as members of a team. Yet E&T
students, who typically struggle with writing tasks, generally
write as individuals and are evaluated only by their
professors. This paper discusses a rationale and methods to
provide students with experience in writing collaboratively
and critiquing one another’s writing. I argue that
collaborative writing promotes active learning and provides
students with experience working as part of a team. Peer
review gives students experience in critical thinking and
promotes editorial skills. These classroom techniques raise
students’ comfort level at having their work evaluated by
others in a professional setting. Course evaluation feedback
and follow-up surveying confirm that students who complete
the course are more likely to write collaboratively in future
courses, and students report that they will seek collaborative
writing opportunities in the workplace.
of E&T serves a high number of “at risk” students, defined
as students who come from ethnically and educationally
disadvantaged backgrounds or are non-native English
speakers. Less than 70% of our E&T students succeed
initially in passing the University’s Writing Proficiency
Exam, which must be attempted by the second sophomore
year and is a requirement for graduation.
Realistically, I cannot resolve all these students’ writing
problems in the 11 weeks that we are together. However, I
can enculture them to consider writing as a social activity,
and thus continue to actively seek feedback on their writing
from experts and peers while they are in school, and
hopefully later from professional colleagues when they reach
the workplace.
This paper describes a rationale and some methods I use
for encouraging students to work collaboratively as writers.
INTRODUCTION
There is a widely recognized need to improve the writing
skills of Engineering and Technology students. In a 1991
survey conducted by the National Society of Professional
Engineers, engineering industry representatives named as the
number one priority for engineering educators: “more
instruction in written and oral communications” [in 2, p.
135]. This perceived gap in engineering skills is not new.
Ninety years ago, a survey conducted by S.C. Earle—the socalled “father of technical writing”—found that most
engineering industry representatives believed their recently
hired engineering graduates “did not have adequate English
skills to perform their work” [3, p. 91].
In its Engineering Criteria 2000 mission statement,
ABET has amended its criteria for evaluating engineering
programs to include student demonstration of “a high level
of communication skills” [4]. Notice that the emphasis is on
communication. Focusing on successful communication
skills for our students rather than on writing per se attests to
the fact that writing is fundamentally a social activity. As
Dorothy Windsor has noted, “any individual’s writing is
called forth and shaped by the needs and aims of the
organization, and that to be understood it must draw on the
vocabulary, knowledge, and beliefs other organizational
members share” [5, p. 271]. Regardless of technical or
grammatical accuracy, the discourse of an engineering text
will fail as communication if it does not adapt to the context
In my 15 years as a technical writer at a NASA center, I
observed that the most successful writers sought multiple
reviews of their work from their colleagues, and many
actively sought mentoring from writers they perceived to be
more expert. Research and development engineers who
publish their work in professional journals must successfully
respond to the evaluation of their peers, yet in an academic
setting we typically train students to write individualistically
and to “write for the teacher” rather than for an audience of
their peers.
For the past 3 years, I have taught a senior-level
professional communication class in a College of
Engineering and Technology, the first 2 years as an adjunct
faculty and last year as a full-time faculty. The class is not
an engineering genre-specific course—I do not instruct
students to write lab reports or technical proofs—but rather
the course is an introduction to the types of professional
communication students will be using in the workplace, as
well as the research skills they will need to access resources
and stay current in their field. The writing and presentation
forms the class concentrates on include memos, proposals,
instructions, progress reports, news stories and press releases
[see 1],1 technical presentations, résumés, cover letters, and
promotional writing about technical subjects. Our College
1
RATIONALE
Department of Technology, California State University, Los Angeles , Los Angeles, CA 90032-8154
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Session S2B
of the cultural situation it addresses. It must both produce
shared meaning for the sender and receiver of the
communication, and promote the writer as a competent
member of the engineering community [6, p. 118].
Successful engineering writing entails adapting to a new
discourse community and mastering its conventions for
communication. While more acculturated engineering
professionals are often able to read their work from the
perspective of their audience and anticipate their audience’s
reaction [7, p.49], novice engineering professionals do not
“naturally” know the discourse of the engineering
community or their audience’s expectations [8, p. 14]. This
is where peer review can be extremely helpful. Educators
have noted that knowledge involving judgment is best
gained through collaboration, and writing is just such a
process of making judgments regarding what to write about,
what to say, how to say it [9]. Writing plays a critical role in
learning how to think, act, and evaluate like an engineer, and
writing and reviewing collaboratively can enhance that role
[10].
I find that students need to be trained and coached in the
peer evaluation process on an ongoing basis. I do this by
providing them with evaluation checklists that they fill out
for the first few assignments. An example of a checklist for
an assignment is shown in Figure 1. Once students seem
confident in evaluating one another’s work, I wean them
from the checklists; however, if the quality of the
evaluations subsequently drops, I re-instate them. I grade the
team’s papers as a group, and if one team member’s paper
contains excessive errors or does not fulfill the assignment, I
point out to all group members that I consider the group
responsible for catching these problems before I am forced
to lower that particular student’s grade. I set high standards
for them as professional engineering writers, along with
voicing a clear expectation that I hold the group responsible
for collectively solving the problem of how to demonstrate
its professional writing competency to me.
M ETHODS
Evaluation Criteria for Memo Assignment
Evaluatee___________________________
Evaluator___________________________
1. Does the draft follow the assignment?
In his recent Bloomfield Distinguished Engineering Lecture
[11], Richard Felder noted that once ABET Engineering
Criteria 2000 is implemented, “engineering graduates will be
2. Is the draft easy to follow and well organized overall?
required
to
demonstrate
communication
and
multidisciplinary teamwork skills.” Felder cites the need for
3. Is the tone of draft professional and appropriate for a business
more cooperative learning activities in engineering
setting?
education, and notes that “several thousand studies have
confirmed the effectiveness of cooperative learning in every
4. Is the purpose clear, are the memo’s conclusions appropriate,
conceivable educational setting” [ibid]. Both Felder and I
and is it clear what actions are being requested?
prepare our students to work collaboratively by pointing out
that this is now standard practice in the workplace, and by
5. Are the sentences clear and well composed stylistically?
citing research findings that students who work in groups
enjoy class more and get better grades [12].
To accomplish the goal of improving communication
6. Is the format correct?
and teamwork skills in my class, I put my students into
teams of four at the beginning of the term. I use a writing
7. Is the draft free of mechanical errors in spelling, grammar, and
skills pre-test to assess current competence, and then
punctuation?
diversify my teams in terms of writing competency,
engineering major, gender, and ethnicity. These teams sit
8. Additional comments to improve the draft:
together and collaborate on writing tasks as well as review
one another’s writing throughout the term. While I do not
grade teams on group writing tasks, I point out continually
that they are responsible for improving one another’s grades
Figure 1. Typical Peer Evaluation Guidelines
through the peer evaluation process. In addition, in several
group writing exercises they compete against other writing
Felder allows his teams to “fire” students who don’t pull
teams for extra credit points. Importantly, a component of
their
weight, and also allows students who consistently do
their grade is based on evaluation by their team members on
most of the work to “quit” the group [11], but he says that
their performance as a peer reviewer and their performance
these options were rarely exercised. I encourage team
as a collaborative task contributor [see also 13].2 I also
members to come to me with problems, and there have been
refuse to accept a paper from a student unless it has been
peer evaluated. If they miss the peer evaluation session, they some, but I have not yet had to re-arrange teams. And I find
that at the end of the term, team members are quite willing to
must take the paper to our University’s Writing Center,
penalize members who have not pulled their weight by
where peer evaluation is also performed.
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Session S2B
evaluating them poorly in the areas where they did not
perform to the level of the other team members.
When students submit their peer-reviewed papers to me,
I ask them to attach the comments from their team members.
However, I do not require them to act on these comments
unless they feel the suggestions are warranted. Peer review
ideally provides students with more latitude to examine
peers’ responses critically than they might feel inclined
toward the teacher’s more authoritative responses. As
Herrington and Cadman have remarked, “the value of peer
review exchanges can be realized as much in instances
where a writer decides not to follow a peer’s advice as where
she does” [14, p. 185]. Peer review empowers students to
make their own decisions about the value of their peer’s
suggestions.
In their studies of peer review in the discipline of
anthropology, Herrington and Cadman also find that
students often focus on substantive matters of interpretation
as well as organization and style, and students reported that
viewing the work of their peers helped them to work out
their own ways of presenting themselves as writers within
the discipline. I have reached the same conclusion about my
classes, where the level of critique is sometimes lacking in
substance but is nearly always thoughtful and often
sophisticated, and where students almost uniformly report
that the process was helpful to them. Often, even students
who are having difficulties with their own writing are able to
give sound advice to others—sometimes working through
their own writing challenges in the process. Students have
impressed me with their ability to stay on task as well as
their competence at recognizing and addressing complex
rhetorical issues in professional engineering writing,
including context, tone, credibility, authority, and
collegiality.
Research on writing groups [15] shows that they:
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stakes by having them write together as a group [7]. I
accomplish this in my class by presenting the group with
collaborative writing exercises that are creative as well as
problem-oriented. I then have the teams compete with one
another and reward the winning team. An example of a
collaborative writing exercise is shown in Figure 2.
Collaborative writing underscores the processes of solving
problems and “thinking together” that are crucial elements
of today’s engineering workplace.
IN-CLASS ASSIGNMENT: GROUP PRESS RELEASE
Your group is being featured in the E&T Department newsletter's "Team
Spirit" column of its newsletter. As a group, write a press release describing
the members of your group and how the group works as a team to
accomplish it s academic goals, as well as any other information you think
would help to demonstrate how your group has "team spirit."
There's one catch. The paper is slated for publication on April 1st. To
celebrate the occasion, your group has decided to try to fool your readers by
including a piece of information about the group that sounds plausible but is
not true. This piece of information should be closely tied with something
about the group that IS true. For instance, you might say that “helping each
other as a team comes easily for our group because we are all from large
families, and in addition, we are all born under the sign of Virgo, and so are
very detail-oriented when it comes to editing each other's work." (This is not
a very exciting example—I am sure your group can be much more creative.)
After you have completed the assignment, it should be turned in to me in
proper press release format, anticipating that the newsletter would likely run
it just as it appears in your copy. In other words, it needs to have a title that
captures the gist of the news, as well as a strong lead that captures the who,
what, where, when, why, and if relevant, how. The story should be in
inverted pyramid order. Underline the two "facts" about your group, and
we as a class will try to guess which statement is true about your group and
which is false.
The group who fools the most of us will get an extra credit point.
Figure 2. Typical Group Writing Assignment
Improve judgment and critical thinking skills
Improve organization and appropriateness
Improve students’ ability to direct others
Improve reflexive understanding of writing as a
mode of discourse and a process
Provide students with a better sense of their
audience
Improve language usage
Increase the amount of student revising done
Reduce student apprehension about writing
Expose students to a wider variety of ideas and
styles
Decrease teacher grading load!
However, as Kathryn Riley comments in her article about
habits of highly effective writers, peer reviewing can be
helpful in an editorial sense but more often on only
superficial features. To move teams toward a more
synergistic and creative relationship, she suggests raising the
Although I do not require the teams to meet outside of
the classroom, I have noticed that they will often arrange
voluntarily to help one another with a writing task, do a late
peer review, or even study together for the mid-term or final.
An additional benefit of collaborative writing is that it gives
the more accomplished writers in the class—who might
already be quite competent and thus unchallenged with
much of the class content—the opportunity to step into my
role as expert and teach other students.
ASSESSMENT AND EVALUATION
As stated above, I have been teaching this course primarily
as an adjunct and have not developed an integral enough
relationship with my students or the Department for students
to return to me with testimonials of its success in preparing
them as professional engineering communicators. Therefore
it is the intention of this paper to present a summary of my
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Session S2B
methods and general evaluations from students as to their
perceived value to them.
However, next year I will join the faculty as a full-time
tenure-track member, and I am in the process of developing
an assessment plan that will provide more accurate
information about whether the outcomes for the class are as I
suspect. My own substantial tenure as a professional
communicator in an engineering environment convinces me
that viewing writing as a social process is critical to one’s
success in the workplace, and this has been confirmed by
students ancedotally. Students who are working in
engineering firms while enrolled in the class have
commented that they are learning skills and techniques that
are immediately useful to them in their work. Recently, two
alumni of my class told me that when faced with a team
project in another class, they were the only team who
literally wrote collaboratively rather than compiling
individual writings, and that they got the highest grade of all
teams on their project. The professor who taught this course
also confirmed that their report excelled because it was more
fully integrated, better organized, and less repetitive than
other team reports.
Our department, while not accredited by ABET,3 is
putting together an extensive assessment plan, and technical
communication competency is being assessed since it is an
outcome that cuts across all programs. In addition to being a
University-wide goal, it has also been identified as high
importance/low performance outcome by our industry
stakeholders in initial surveys. The assessment questionnaire
will go to senior students, alumni, and student employers
(stakeholders). In addition to questions we plan to ask
regarding technical communication competency in general,
questions I plan to ask regarding peer evaluation and
collaborative writing specifically are the following:
• I [my employees] seek feedback from their peers on
their technical communication projects (memos,
reports, presentations, etc.) before disseminating
final versions.
• I [my employees] seek advice on their technical
communication projects from more senior or expert
members of the organization.
• I [my employees] have written collaboratively on
one or more occasions.
This data, when we implement the study next year, will
provide me with a more accurate assessment of the outcomes
of my course goals. In the meantime, in present standardized
course exit evaluations, students tend to focus their
comments on my performance and the contents of the course
rather than on their peer review work. A typical comment is
as follows:
I think students’ focus on teaching and course content
underscores that students are just as ingrained as their
teachers in viewing knowledge as something that is
transferred to them by experts and then carried around in
their heads, rather than something that is socially constructed
in response to specific contexts and settings. An example of
this view is encapsulated in one of the few negative
comments I’d had about group work:
I found the group work to be time wasted. I
would rather hear from the instructor.
Despite this criticism, I do believe that students’
collaborative experiences are fundamental to empowering
them as communicators and to encouraging positive social
actions in their academic and professional lives that will
promote their continued growth as engineering
communicators. When prompted to consider this more
carefully, as I believe will be the case in the assessment
process, I believe students will reflect on and recognize the
value of peer review and collaborative writing.
I close this paper with additional comments from
student evaluations on collaborative writing and peer review.
I found that working with teams was much easier
and fun. I was able to meet other classmates and
use their skills to resolve my assignment
problems.
I enjoyed the group work and peer sessions.
What was nice was that it was done in class and
we worked well together. I enjoyed working with
others in different fields. I learned a lot from
them and would recommend this again.
Dividing groups depending on pre-exam results
was a good idea that made me work effectively
with other group members.
Peer assignments helped the class get other
students’ perspectives on different writing
assignments.
I really enjoyed the group work. We had fun in
class and the environment was fun and relaxing.
It was an enjoyable way to work.
***
END NOTES
1
It is great to have a teacher who knows the class
material. Thank you, I’ve learned a lot. By the
way, group work is a good idea.
I teach journalistic writing techniques in this class for
several reasons. First, I find my students have had little
classroom exposure to this writing style, which is pervasive
in our society. Second, writing in scientific fields has
increasingly taken a more news-oriented turn, with the most
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Session S2B
important information and results foregrounded [1].
Managers of engineering organizations increasingly expect
this kind of reporting of technical information.
2
I ask students to rate other group members on a scale of 5
to 1, corresponding to excellent, very good, adequate, needs
improvement, or poor, on the following criteria: 1) This
group member was always prepared and willing to
contribute to group assignments, 2) This group member gave
me valuable feedback on my work, 3) This group member
made a valuable contribution to our group’s teamwork
efforts. An additional successful group evaluation method is
to have group members rank their group’s performance
(including their own) or else spread 100 points according to
each member’s level of contribution (again, including their
own). [See 14].
3
The Technology Department falls under the professional
umbrella of the National Association for Industrial
Technology, and thus far we have opted as a department not
to seek accreditation for various reasons.
[10] Herrington, A. J., “Writing in Academic Settings: A Study of
the Contexts for Writing in Two College Chemical
Engineering Courses,” Research in the Teaching of English,
19(4), Dec. 1985, 331-361.
[11] Felder, R. M., “Educating Tomorrow’s Engineers.”
Bloomfield Distingished Engineering Lecture, Wichita, KS:
Wichita State University, Nov. 4, 1999.
[12] Carnevale, A. P., Gainer, L. J., and Meltzer, A. S., 1988.
Workplace Basics: Skills Employers Want. Washington D.C.:
The American Society for Training and Development and the
U.S. Department of Labor Employment and Training
Administration.
[13] Catanach Jr., A. H., and Rhoades, S. C., “A Practical Guide to
Collaborative Writing Assignments in Financial Accounting
Courses,” Issues in Accounting Education, 12(2), Fall 1997,
521-537.
[14] Herrington, A. J., and Cadman, D., “Peer Review and
Revising in an Anthropology Course: Les sons for Learning,”
College Composition and Communication, 42(2), May 1991,
184-199.
[15] Gere, A. R. , and Abbott, R. D, “Talking About Writing: The
Language of Writing Groups,” Research in the Teaching of
English, 19(4), Dec. 1985, 362-381.
REFERENCES
[1] Berkenkotter, C., and Huckin, T., “News Value in Scientific
Journal Articles.” Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary
Communication: Cognition/Culture/ Power. Hillsdale, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., 1995.
[2] Landis , R. B. Studying Engineering: A Road Map to a
Rewarding Career. Burbank, CA: Discovery Press. 1995.
[3] Kynell, T. “English as an Engineering Tool: Samuel Chandler
Earle and the Tufts Experiment.” J. Technical Writing and
Communication, 25(1), 1995 85-92.
[4] Director, Engineering Accreditation Commission, ABET,
“Engineering Criteria 2000,” Baltimore, MD, 1999.
[5] Windsor, D. A., “An Engineer’s Writing and the Corporate
Construction of Knowledge,” Written Communication 6(3),
July 1989, 270-285.
[6] McGo wan, U., Seton, J., and Cargill, M., “A Collaborating
Colleague Model for Inducting International Engineering
Students into the Language and Culture of a Foreign Research
Environment,” IEEE Trans. Professional Communication,
39(3), Sept. 1996, 117-121.
[7] Riley, K., “Seven Habits of Highly Effective Writers,” IEEE
Trans. Professional Communication, 42(1), March 1999, 4751.
[8] Walker, K., “Using Genre Theory to Teach Students
Engineering Lab Report Writing,” IEEE Trans. Professional
Communication, 42(1), March 1999, 12-19.
[9] Henschen, B. M., and Sidlow, E. I., “Collaborative Writing,”
College Teaching, 38(1), Winter 1990, 29-32.
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