Clear communication of complex technical concepts vexes both undergraduate engineering students and professors who often throw up their hands exclaiming, "Why can't students write?" Instead of decrying students' skills or blaming the English department, the engineering department in this study decided to reframe writing as a process of collaboration, rather than a final product. Working with an English faculty member embedded in our department, we designed a peer review and reflection activity for junior and senior level chemical engineering laboratory courses. We hypothesized that incorporating this would improve student writing by providing more writing time and facilitating knowledge transfer from lower-level composition courses. We collected data in a senior chemical engineering laboratory course (N=52). Students completed a survey about their past writing courses. After conducting their experiment, students wrote short technical report drafts and then participated in a peer review session. They were given instruction about genre and stylistic conventions for lab reports. They filled out a peer review rubric to guide them in giving feedback and wrote a short reflection about the process, including what they learned. Students revised their reports based on feedback from their peer reviewer and the instructor and turned in a reflective memo to explain changes they made in the revision process. Students also provided feedback on the process. We repeated this process with long reports a few weeks later. We conducted qualitative analysis on the student work. Students critiqued their peer's work, finding everything from mechanical and grammatical errors, troubled tables, figures, and calculations, to issues with coherence and logical flow of ideas. While students did not have sufficient background to give technical feedback on the first short report, they were able to on the long reports. Students responded positively overall to the process and reflected on their own writing. The revision process resulted in significant gains in conceptual understanding, t(51)= 12.01, p < 0.0001, with a large effect size, (d = -1.68). Scores increased for 49 out of 52 students at an average improvement of 33.97% (SD = 20.41%). The revision process vastly improved their understanding of the technical content and interpretation of their results, as well as the overall quality of writing of technical reports. Embedding the process of writing in a lab setting provides a structured opportunity for students to review their own work and another's critically. As we have shown in this study, engineering students can be guided toward improved technical writing.
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