Abstract
Rice University’s bioengineering department incorporates written, oral, and visual communication instruction into its undergraduate curriculum to aid student learning and to prepare students to communicate their knowledge and discoveries precisely and persuasively. In a tissue culture lab course, we used a self- and peer-review tool called Calibrated Peer Review™ (CPR) to diagnose student learning gaps in visual communication skills on a poster assignment. We then designed an active learning intervention that required students to practice the visual communication skills that needed improvement and used CPR to measure the changes. After the intervention, we observed that students performed significantly better in their ability to develop high quality graphs and tables that represent experimental data. Based on these outcomes, we conclude that guided task practice, collaborative learning, and calibrated peer review can be used to improve engineering students’ visual communication skills.
Highlights
Background on Visual Communication in EngineeringImportance of Visual Communication in EngineeringIn The Engineer of 2020: Visions of Engineering in the New Century the National Academy of Engineering identifies communication skills as a top priority for engineering graduates to be successful.[18]
Some engineering faculty have found that students are ill-prepared to visualize and interpret data and have taken the initiative to explicitly teach students at every level how to become more proficient in these areas.[6]
A scaffolded approach to learning that involves frequent practice and feedback is needed to achieve a high level of visual communication competency
Summary
Background on Visual Communication in EngineeringImportance of Visual Communication in EngineeringIn The Engineer of 2020: Visions of Engineering in the New Century the National Academy of Engineering identifies communication skills as a top priority for engineering graduates to be successful.[18]. In addition to written and oral skills, engineers need to possess visual communication competencies such as sketching, modeling, rendering, and data presentation.[4,9] To develop these competencies, many engineering faculty assign. Dupen introduces first-year students to data presentation in lab reports through a combination of mini-lecture, assignment-specific instructions, and repeated practice.[8] A scaffolded approach to learning that involves frequent practice and feedback is needed to achieve a high level of visual communication competency. It was designed to facilitate peergraded writing assignments in large lecture courses and has been widely adopted by educators in a variety of disciplines including biology, chemistry, engineering, and medical education.[1,12,14,15] Faculty have used CPR to assess essay writing,[28] lab reports and design reports,[12] technical writing,[16] and course content.[17].
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