Work in Progress: The Use of Scaffolding and Peer Reviews to Improve Effective Writing Skills in Biomedical Engineers

摘要

Technical knowledge among engineering graduates is at an all time high, however those same graduates lack interpersonal and social skills that would be required in present-day job settings. Some of the skills that these graduates lack are effective communication and teamwork, both skills being of high value and importance in a job setting for engineers that have to work closely and collaboratively with fellow co-workers. While technical expertise and knowledge have profound impacts on the skills employers look for when hiring graduates, recently employers have started emphasizing the importance of skills such as integrity, communication, and flexibility. The emergence of these skills is a result of the economic shift from an industrial to an information society. This means that there is a need to further emphasize these kinds of skills early in higher education curricula so that students can grasp the importance of these skills in the beginning of their academic career and long before starting their professional career. In an effort to train senior biomedical engineering students to be more effective writers we adopted a two-stage approach that began with first training the professors to effectively teach students to be better writers (Maroon Institute for Writing Excellence) then employing two strategies: Writing-to-Learn and "Scaffolding" Writing in the course to develop our students into effective writers (Figure 1).