Session 13b5
The Evolution of Integrating Writing into Engineering: Tracing Iterations of
Writing Instruction in a Sophomore Engineering Course
Deanna Ramey and Jerry Hudgins
Electrical and Computer Engineering Department
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208
Abstract - This paper will discuss the iterations of writing
instruction that the USC Electrical and Computer
Engineering Writing Center has used in a sophomore ECE
lab course since 1995. These various attempts to integrate
writing into the course include voluntary small groups,
mandatory small groups, hiring a separate technical writing
Teaching Assistant to grade the writing content of the lab
reports, individual consultations, and having Writing Center
TAs give lectures on various aspects of writing lab reports in
the recitation. We will discuss the history of the lab course,
its status in the Department and in the student curriculum,
and the creation of the ECE Writing Center as a resource to
elevate writing instruction in this class. Next, we will trace
the goals of the writing instruction and how they represent
the larger educational goals of the ECE Department and the
College of Engineering. Finally, we will examine some of the
modes of writing instruction and evaluate the weaknesses
and strengths of each method.
electrical engineering and is the strongest link between the
two curricula. The first laboratory course, EECE 201, is
taken the second term of the sophomore year and teaches
basic tools and techniques using simple electronic circuits
for demonstration. A strong emphasis is placed on learning
how to organize and present technical information through
formal reports. Prerequisites are the first courses in
electrical and computer engineering, Digital Logic Design
and Circuits I. Other curriculum details can be found in [1].
MATH 141
MATH 142
Circuits - Electronics
Thread
MATH 242
EECE 221 Circuits I
ECE
CORE COURSES
Logic - Software
Thread
EECE 211 Dig Logic
Lab Thread
MATH 241
EECE 222 Circuits II
EECE 201 Lab I
EECE 212 µP
EECE 371 Electronics
EECE 301 Lab II
EECE 351 Software
EECE 302 Lab III
The USC Electrical and Computer Engineering
Department Curriculum and Writing Center
Design Project I
Design Project II
ECE Curriculum
Strong emphasis is placed on the design element of our
curricula and in particular with the laboratory courses that
begin in the sophomore year. The essence of engineering is
creating, or designing, solutions to problems or providing
new opportunities. A significant part of this activity consists
of using knowledge to transfer ideas and concepts to reality.
Communication skills, particularly the written word, are
therefore essential to achieving an engineering solution to a
problem.
The ECE Department at USC has two structured 124
credit-hour programs (semester system) for Electrical
Engineering (EE) and Computer Engineering (CE) that
integrate five stand-alone laboratory courses (3 credit-hours
each) throughout both curricula. The laboratory sequence
terminates with a team-structured project in the senior year.
The five required laboratory courses are quite strongly
integrated into both the EE and CE curricula and strong
threads exist throughout the curricula, as shown in Figure 1.
All of the labs are based on fundamental electronics
principles. This seems appropriate since this is the heart of
Figure 1. ECE core showing the laboratory and curriculum
threads.
ECE Writing Center
The ECE Department started a new service in the fall of
1995, the ECE Writing Center. The ECE Writing Center is a
joint venture of the ECE Department, the Composition and
Rhetoric faculty of the English Department, and the
University Writing Center. The motivation for the creation
of this partnership was an increased awareness in the
department of the importance of communication skills. This
was illustrated by our response to two memorable questions
from our first contact (spring 1995) with the University
Writing Center. First, when they asked why we were
interested in them, we responded that it was relatively
simple. Of talking, listening, reading, and writing, only
writing was blessed with a center. Second, when they asked
what our goals were, we responded that we wanted to turn
out the best writers on campus.
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November 10 - 13, 1999 San Juan, Puerto Rico
29th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference
13b5-1
Session 13b5
A team, consisting of the Acting Director of the
University Writing Center, a professor in Composition and
Rhetoric, and a professor from ECE, was formed. The team
met several times to establish the ECE Department's goals
and needs for its own writing center satellite and to discuss
the feasibility of staffing such a center. With a clear set of
goals for the proposed three-year pilot writing center, the
team submitted a proposal to NSF (through the Gateway
Coalition) for funding. We received a planning grant for
that summer and created a model for the pilot version of the
center, to be started in the fall 1995. During the planning
phase we focused on creating a program centered around the
laboratory sequence, with 201 as the initial target. A
terminally degreed professional in composition and rhetoric
was hired as a part time consultant for the ECE center. This
Director of the Writing Center worked with the ECE
professor teaching the 201 course as they collected examples
of student lab reports. The Director and the professor also
developed prototypes of several handouts that explained how
to write certain sections of a lab report (i.e. abstracts,
introductions, conclusions, etc.).
Within the first month of operation the scope of the
center was increased to include the freshman introductory
engineering course and several other ECE courses. The
center also represented an opportunity for significant
personal contact in a system that most feel had become too
de-personalized. It is still a little early to pass judgment on
our goal of producing the best writers on campus. However,
the ECE Writing Center has spawned a College of
Engineering Communications Center, and a similar center in
the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of
South Carolina.
Teaching Communications Skills through the
ECE Writing Center
One of the ECE Department's goals is to prepare ECE
students for the responsibilities of professional engineering.
One aspect of education that many professional engineers
who are USC graduates have discussed with the Department
is communications skills. These USC graduates emphasize
that they not only rely on their engineering knowledge on
the job, but also on their abilities to speak and write well. As
David Bloomquist, an engineering professor at the
University of Florida, has noted, "As a student, you spend
90% of your time in engineering doing calculations and 10%
of your time writing. As a professional on the job, you spend
probably 15% of your time working with numbers and 85%
of your time writing" [2]. Many graduates have encouraged
USC's College of Engineering to increase the training that
undergraduates receive in communications.
The ECE Department endorses this suggestion and has
implemented new strategies for emphasizing communication
throughout the ECE curriculum. In 1995, when the Writing
Center first worked with EECE 201, students in the course
wrote 12 lab reports during the course of the semester. While
this genre of writing afforded students the chance to learn
the lab report format by heart, the lab report is not the main
form of writing that students will produce once they become
engineers. So, the ECE Writing Center made incorporating
technical writing assignments, like oral presentations,
progress reports, and technical memos, a priority in the
revision of the EECE 201 curriculum to embed additional
technical writing instruction in the sophomore lab course.
The Writing Center staff are responsible for most of the
writing instruction in the 201 course. We work closely with
the ECE professor and administrator who oversee the course
to customize the instruction to fit each semester's students'
needs. To further the goals of lifelong learning and
professional education, the Writing Center focuses some of
the 201 instruction on audience analysis. Writing Center
staff lead class discussions about the appropriate level of
detail to include in different sections of the lab report, for
example. Staff also discuss why information in a lab report
is repeated in different sections of the report for different
readers' purposes. In this way, the Writing Center attempts to
show students how the writing they do as undergraduates
will pertain to their careers as professional engineers.
Another aspect of writing instruction that the Writing
Center has developed is teaching engineering students about
the persuasive aspects of writing. Many engineering students
resist viewing their engineering work as persuasive writing.
Charles Bazerman examines the persuasive aspect inherent
in scientific writing in Shaping Written Knowledge. He
writes, “Persuasion is at the heart of science, not at the
unrespectable fringe. An intelligent rhetoric practiced within
a serious, experienced, knowledgeable, committed research
community is a serious method of truth seeking. The most
serious scientific communication is not that which disowns
persuasion, but which persuades in the deepest, most
compelling manner, thereby sweeping aside more superficial
arguments” [3]. One of the most critical aspects of
communication that engineering students need to learn is
using their writing (even their “factual” writing) to persuade
others. One problem that the Writing Center staff noticed
with the first set of lab reports for the spring 1999 semester
was the lack of analysis and specific details in the reports.
Students seemed to feel that the tables of data and the graphs
represented the analysis and that words were not necessary.
Yet students need to learn how to communicate results and
analysis with words because many of their writing
responsibilities as professional engineers will entail
evaluation and making recommendations. And both of these
genres fall under the category of persuasion.
Students now also have the opportunity to give
individual oral presentations in the 201 course. This
assignment was added to the course because most ECE
students were not required to give an oral presentation until
0-7803-5643-8/99/$10.00 © 1999 IEEE
November 10 - 13, 1999 San Juan, Puerto Rico
29th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference
13b5-2
Session 13b5
they reached their senior level courses. By that time, any
feedback that these students received on their presentation
skills was too little, too late because they were about to
graduate. Now, students get feedback in the sophomore year,
so they have a benchmark to work from when they get to the
senior level. Student comments on course evaluations
indicate that many students appreciate this opportunity to
practice their oral presentation skills and to receive
substantive feedback from both engineering and
communications experts.
Iterations of Writing Instruction
The Traditional Writing Center Model
When the ECE Writing Center opened in fall 1995, its
main task was to work with the sophomore lab course,
EECE 201. The Writing Center used a traditional writing
center approach of encouraging students to make
appointments for individual consultations and clearly
separating any Writing Center involvement from the grading
aspects of the course. The Writing Center did, however,
have the students come to the Writing Center for weekly
meetings in groups of 4-6 students. In these meetings,
Writing Center staff would present information about
sections of the lab report like abstracts, introductions, and
conclusions and discuss any problem students were having
with the lab reports. This model relied on student selfdisclosure of problems and on voluntary attendance of the
groups. Perhaps not surprisingly, this model failed because
busy students often skipped their writing groups, and almost
no students chose to share writing problems they were
having.
Another approach the Writing Center and the ECE
Department used was to hire a Technical Writing Teaching
Assistant to provide the writing instruction in the class and
to grade the writing portion of the labs. The Writing Center's
role was to supplement the writing instruction provided by
the Technical Writing TA. That is, students could bring their
lab reports to the Writing Center for consultations, but the
Writing Center remained a "safe place" for students, a place
not associated with grading. The main limitation of this
model is that graduate teaching assistants who have
composition backgrounds and a knowledge of technical
fields like engineering are difficult to replace when they
graduate. Most composition graduate students at USC
already have assistantships in the English Department, so
there is not a large pool of available replacements.
presentations on communications topics but still refrained
from grading the lab reports. During this semester, the ECE
professor would lecture for an hour, and then he would turn
the class over to the Writing Center for some
communications instruction. One drawback to this model
was the clear separation between the engineering instructors
and the Writing Center instructors. The Writing Center came
into the class after the engineering instruction was over, and
the engineering staff left the room when the writing
instruction began. Thus the separation between engineering
and writing was physically manifested by the instructors'
behaviors. The students clearly picked up on this separation
because their end-of-semester evaluations reflected this
concern. One student stated, "The Writing Center needs to
communicate with the engineering TAs more so that they do
not give conflicting information about how to write the
labs." Another wrote, "It was sort of confusing when the
Writing Center would tell us one thing and then our TA
would say something different."
New Writing Center Territory
In an effort to bridge this division of engineering and
writing instruction, we have instituted another new model of
writing instruction in the spring 1999 semester. This model
is a modification of the Technical Writing TA model. There
are two Writing Center TAs on the syllabus as well as the
four engineering TAs. The Writing Center TAs provide the
writing instruction in the first hour of the recitation, and the
engineering staff are present and attentive. Then, the Writing
Center TAs remain in the class while the engineering
recitation occurs. Also, the Writing Center TAs grade (for
the first time) the writing portion of the labs (40 out of 100
points on each lab). This has been an unexpected success
from the Writing Center's perspective, because our teaching
has been greatly improved by this increased access to
student writing. Since we are seeing all of the students' labs,
we have a much greater knowledge of what problems
students are encountering in their writing. Therefore, we can
better customize the instruction we provide in the course.
Writing Center consultants are all either M.A or Ph.D.
candidates in the USC Composition and Rhetoric program
and thus have received significant training in composition
theory and pedagogy. The Writing Center TAs have at least
two years of ECE Writing Center experience and have
provided all of the writing instruction in the 201 class for the
past three years. Writing Center TAs have also consulted
with individual 201 students on their lab report writing and
have studied examples of student writing (both successful
and unsuccessful) provided by several EECE 201 professors.
This immersion into the engineering, and particularly EECE
201, culture qualifies the Writing Center consultants to grade
the writing portion of the lab grades.
The Writing in the Disciplines Model
The next model of Writing Center instruction drew on
work from the Writing in the Disciplines (WID) movement.
The Writing Center used practices such as genre theory and
discourse analysis to create units of instruction like "How to
Write a Lab Report" and "What to Include in a Technical
Memo." The Writing Center consultants gave these in-class
0-7803-5643-8/99/$10.00 © 1999 IEEE
November 10 - 13, 1999 San Juan, Puerto Rico
29th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference
13b5-3
Session 13b5
12
Overall, how useful was today's session in helping you learn about
giving oral presentations?
1
useless
2
not very
useful
3
somewhat
useful
4
very
useful
5
extremely
useful
4.
What did you find most helpful about today's Writing Center
instruction? (Please list one or two specific examples.)
5.
How could the class have been improved?
(Please list one or two specific suggestions.)
Fig. 2. EECE 201 student evaluation of Writing Center
lecture on Oral Presentations.
Extremely
Clear
Extremely Extremely
Interesting Useful
5
extremely
interesting
Very
Useful
4
very
interesting
Very
Interesting
3
somewhat
interesting
8
18
16
6
14
4
12
10
2
8
0
6
4
2
0
Somewhat Somewhat
Interesting Useful
2
mostly
boring
10
Not very
Useful
5
extremely clear
Overall, how interesting did you find today's session?
1
totally
boring
3.
4
very clear
Mostly
Boring
2.
3
mostly
clear
Very
Clear
Fig. 4. Results from question 2 on evaluation.
1.
2
somewhat
unclear
Mostly
Clear
While most of the class rated the presentation as either
mostly clear or very clear, approximately 10 students did
choose somewhat unclear as their rating.
14
1
totally
unclear
Somewhat
Unclear
Fig. 3. Results from question 1 on evaluation.
Directions: Please respond honestly and constructively to the questions
below by circling the responses you most agree with and writing brief
comments.
On the scale below, please rate the clarity of today's instruction on
oral presentations.
Totally
Unclear
Evaluation of Writing Center Presentation
Writing Center staff gave an oral presentation on how to
give oral presentations in the 201 course. The presentation
focused on how to organize ideas and how to use
PowerPoint in an oral presentation situation. Immediately
following the presentation and question/answer session, the
evaluation in Figure 2 was administered to the students. The
questionnaire asks students to rate the clarity and usefulness
of the presentation, as well as how interesting students found
the presentation. Then students were asked to comment on
one useful aspect of the presentation and on one aspect that
could be improved.
We received 30 responses, and figures 3 through 5
represent the range of responses for questions 1 through 3.
18
16
14
12
10
8
6
4
2
0
Useless
This semester, Deanna Ramey, a Writing Center consultant
and adjunct faculty member of the ECE Department, is
writing her dissertation on the development of writing
instruction models in the EECE 201 course. The following
questionnaire and graphs represent some of the preliminary
data she is gathering in this project to evaluate and assess the
writing instruction in the course.
The following graphs, Figures 3, 4, and 5, show the results
of students' responses to questions 1-3, respectively.
Totally
Boring
Evaluation of the Spring 1999 Model
Fig. 5. Results from question 3 on evaluation.
Figures 4 and 5 represent the students' ratings of the
interest and usefulness of the presentation, respectively.
Again, while most students gave a positive rating to the
presentation, close to one-third of the class found the
presentation either mostly boring or not very useful.
Student answers to questions 4 and 5 provide some
reasons for the negative responses. The predominant
0-7803-5643-8/99/$10.00 © 1999 IEEE
November 10 - 13, 1999 San Juan, Puerto Rico
29th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference
13b5-4
Session 13b5
suggestion was that the Writing Center needs to modify the
presentation to address more specific concerns of the 201
students about how to turn lab information into an oral
presentation. In question 5, 10 of 30 students (1/3 of the
class) made concrete suggestions like "An example of a
former 201 presentation would have been helpful."
What we learn from this in a preliminary stage, is that
our general presentation on oral presentations is probably
too simplistic for the students in the EECE 201 course. Since
these students are presenting lab information in an oral
manner for the first time, their needs are more specific.
Therefore, the Writing Center instruction needs to address
these specific concerns more directly. As a result of the
survey, we asked students to give us copies of their
PowerPoint presentations to use as models for next
semester's Writing Center presentation. At present, at least 5
students have responded and given us permission to use their
work as models. While a sample size of 30 students may not
be statistically significant on its own, the response to the
questionnaire is combined with several qualitative
methodologies such as participant observation and document
analysis to support the observations and evaluations of the
Writing Center program.
This questionnaire is only one example of the
assessments of the spring 1999 model that the Writing
Center implemented. Other methods include administering a
final course evaluation and interviewing students. Ramey is
currently analyzing the lab reports from 18 students using a
list of four criteria to evaluate the improvement (if any) in
student lab report writing over the course of the semester.
Ramey's dissertation, to be published in September 1999,
will contain the results of this document analysis and the
recommendations for future Writing Center involvement in
grading in the lab course.
References
[1] J.S. Byrd and J.L. Hudgins, “Teaming in the design
laboratory,” ASEE Jnl. Engrg. Ed., vol. 84, no. 4, pp.
335-342, Oct., 1995.
[2] J. Douglas, "Recipe for Success: Writing in the
Disciplines." Proc. Workshop on Engineering Writing
and Professional Communications Centers, pp.33-47,
1998.
[3] C. Bazerman, Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre
and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science, pp.
321, Wisconsin: U of Wisconsin P, 1988.
Summary
The ECE Writing Center has established a successful and
productive relationship with the EECE 201 sophomore lab
course because of the close ties between the faculty and
administration who lead the course and the Writing Center
staff. This relationship is strengthened by the ECE
Department's commitment to increasing the communications
skills of their graduates. The ECE Writing Center is a
manifestation of this commitment to training engineering
students to write and speak professionally before they
graduate. While the Writing Center is still seeking the ideal
model for incorporating communications instruction into the
201 course, its reflective evaluation and close
communication with both students and faculty in 201 has
resulted in a significant presence of communications
instruction in the ECE lab curriculum. It is this instruction
that will allow the ECE Department to achieve its goal of
producing "the best writers on campus."
0-7803-5643-8/99/$10.00 © 1999 IEEE
November 10 - 13, 1999 San Juan, Puerto Rico
29th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference
13b5-5