Assessing writing instruction in a sophomore engineering course: Iterations of integrating writing from 1995--1999.

摘要

This project presents the data gathered in a study of the writing instruction provided by the Writing Center in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at the University of South Carolina. I examine the history of the ECE Writing Center and its four-year relationship with a sophomore lab course, EECE 201. The ECE Writing Center was established to integrate writing instruction into the 201 lab course as an ECE Departmental attempt to address one of the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET) accreditation goals, demonstrating integration of communications and writing instruction into the existing curriculum. Since 1995, the ECE Writing Center has used several different methods of introducing writing instruction into the 201 course. These methods include voluntary writing groups, mandatory groups, studio groups, individual consultations, and hiring a technical writing teaching assistant to grade the writing portion of lab reports. In the spring 1999 semester, the Writing Center staff provided the writing instruction in the course and graded the writing content of the lab reports.; My dissertation contains the information I gathered from student interviews and surveys, writing center documents and presentations, and my observation journal. In addition, I analyzed student lab reports for specific writing characteristics to demonstrate a connection between Writing Center instruction and improvement in student writing. These characteristics are: purpose statements in abstracts; introduction of tables and graphs with sentences or phrases to give the readers context for the data; use of subheadings; and provision of sentences of analysis and explanation for discrepancies in data that occurred in the lab. By analyzing this data in the context of Writing in the Disciplines (WID) and Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) theory, I drew conclusions about the success of the ECE Departments Writing in the Disciplines effort. This work builds on the previous dissertation by Kristin Walker, Assessing Students' Genre Knowledge in an Engineering Writing Center: An Analysis of Sophomore Lab Reports in Electrical and Computer Engineering, published in 1997.