Engaging ABET Writing Outcomes in Writing and Engineering Learning Communities

by Ken Thompson, English Department

Many Engineering and IT students come to Mason not liking writing and believing that they will not have to do much writing. The fact that the Accrediting Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) includes training in writing and communication in its evaluations of Engineering and IT programs probably means less to students than it does to administrators and faculty, for whom students’ writing competence is vitally important. Some reasons why: In 1996, ABET adopted new standards for evaluating programs in applied science, computing, engineering, and related fields. The EC2000 (Engineering Criteria 2000) lists 11 specific learning outcomes. The ability to apply knowledge from science and engineering, design and conduct experiments, and develop systems, processes and devices are, as we might expect, key parts of the list. But also included are the ability to communicate effectively, to work in interdisciplinary teams, and to understand the social impact of technology on a global level. In 2002, ABET commissioned a group at Pennsylvania State University to study the impact of the new criteria on Engineering education. As part of the study, when the Penn State team surveyed 1,622 employers on the importance of these outcomes in their hiring decisions, 91% rated communicating effectively as “highly important “or “essential.” No other criterion scored as highly.(Executive Summary 11)

These data and the fact that Engineering and IT students have to make important career choices quite early in their academic careers provides an opening for the teaching of writing. In my experience, as I’ll explain, writing courses that provide students with an opportunity to reflect on the career choices they face as well as to learn about the history of technology have been far more successful than stand-alone writing courses I’ve taught. I first developed writing courses linked to Science and Technology Studies for the Mason Topics program. Since the demise of Mason Topics, I have been working with the Freshman Center to create and teach a learning community that links English 101: Introductory Composition with University 100 sections taught by Volgenau administrators.

Teaching writing to students in the applied sciences through focusing on subject areas more in alignment with their interests works, but not always for the reasons I expected. The first semester I taught a writing course for engineers, we focused on the so-called War of the Currents in late 19th century America. Sometimes called the first standards war, this was a struggle between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse over whose system would be used to electrify the country. Students wrote on how devices like transformers operate but also on the differences between the work styles of figures such as Edison and Tesla. By the end of the class, they had writen a series of blog posts and a paper on the ethical issues raised by some of Edison’s more questionable business practices.

What I didn’t fully understand at first was that student interest in the subject came partly from the fact that they were looking for career models, both negative and positive. Here, one of the original sources for my plan proved to have more to teach me than I originally realized. In the 1860s, Samuel Smiles’ Lives of the Engineers was published in three volumes. In this and earlier works, Smiles celebrated the careers of figures like George Stephenson, the English railway inventor and pioneer. I had read and taught Smiles’ work before but with a detached historical interest in his doctrine of self-help. My approach to the War of the Currents was similarly academic. That is not how my students saw the subject, and I now believe that is why my assignments worked so well. Besides providing inspiring stories, the readings I assigned also showed them a range of career options. In the end, they wrote better papers and developed their powers of analysis and critical thinking because they connected with the material beyond the learning goals I’d imagined when I designed my syllabus. Writing courses taught in disciplinary contexts, like the learning community model I’ve described, not only forward writing across the curriculum goals, they also engage in a very real way with the ABET communication outcomes.

What does competent writing look like in engineering and the technological sciences?

by Terry Zawecki, WAC Director

Since 2000, ABET has required academic programs to report on their students’ communicative competence in several “soft skills” areas. These include the ability to design and conduct experiments and to interpret and analyze the resulting data; to collaborate well in teams and with students from diverse disciplines and backgrounds; and to communicate effectively, both orally and in writing. Students should know, for example, what type of communication to use in a given rhetorical situation; how to use evidence that the target audience recognizes as accurate and credible, and how to organize their team to achieve their communicative ends. For an informative discussion of how students learn to develop these competencies in their technical studies, I highly recommend a new book from the MIT press, Learning to Communicate in Science and Engineering: Case Studies from MIT by Mya Poe, Neal Lerner, and Jennifer Craig. Each chapter of this valuable book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how students acquire communicative competence in a range of genres and contexts, how they learn to collaborate across differences, how they respond to high-stakes peer review processes typical of the sciences and engineering, and how, as writers, they learn the discipline better through writing.