Assessing writing in a comprehensive design experience course

Comprehensive design courses, also called capstone or senior design courses, serve an important role in most engineering curricula. These courses can be challenging for both the student and instructor because of their breadth and open-ended nature. As the need for effective communication skills among engineering graduates grows, emphasis on strengthening writing feedback and assessment throughout the curriculum also increases. The capstone course typically involves a significant amount of writing and is another opportunity for faculty to provide writing feedback to the students. The challenge is in successfully fitting an increased focus on writing and the writing process into a course whose list of learning objectives is already lengthy. Maintaining the technical and design aspects of the course is essential, but programs should also strive to maximize the potential for thoughtful writing assessment that can significantly help the students develop as writers. This paper uses several years of experience from a comprehensive design experience (CDE) course, taught in the Civil and Architectural Engineering Department at the University of Wyoming, as the basis of discussion on methods for integrating writing feedback and assessment into a capstone design course. The CDE course requires writing a design proposal and a final design report. Throughout the last five years different methods for helping students develop writing skills and assessing writing have been implemented; this paper provides issues to consider and strategies for instructors of similar courses.