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The purpose of this study is to develop an instructional model to improve the reading abilities of technical documents, and to enhance students' positive learning attitudes for TVE college students in China. This study developed a teaching model based on the Information Processing Approach, Vygotsky's Scaffolding, and Motivation. This teaching mode has the characteristics and technical attributes of TVE, which can (a) improve the reading ability of TVE college students on technical documentation, and (b) enhance the students' positive learning attitude (enthusiasm). This teaching model includes (1) Principles of the model, (2) Objectives, (3) Syntax, (4) Social system, (5) Principles of reaction, and (6) Support system. Through the application of two classes at Shenzhen Institute Technology in China, it can be seen that three-information input and output activities can be formed in both applications, and there is a progressive relationship between the three activities, and the three activities can fully stimulate students' learning enthusiasm.

This research investigates the impact of ChatGPT-generated feedback on the writing skills of first-year computing students at a Saudi University. Employing a qualitative research design, the study involved 111 male students, blinded to the switch from human to ChatGPT-generated feedback, ensuring unbiased reflections on their experiences. Over six weeks, students' reactions to feedback were meticulously analyzed, revealing nuanced emotional, psychological, and educational impacts. The findings, organized into four distinct themes - Emotional and Psychological Responses, Perceived Quality and Usefulness, Progress and Development, and Feedback Content and Delivery - offer rich insights into the multifaceted experiences of students. While some students responded to the feedback provided during weeks 4 and 5 (ChatGPT-generated feedback), perceiving it as a catalyst for learning and self-improvement, others expressed concerns about its consistency and personalization. The study highlights the potential of ChatGPT in education, while also illuminating the need for a balanced, adaptive, and personalized approach to feedback that aligns with diverse learning styles, emotional responses, and educational needs.

The use of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) large language models has increased in both professional and classroom technical writing settings. One common response to student use of GAI is to increase surveillance, incorporating plagiarism detection services or banning certain composing activities from the classroom. This paper argues such measures are harmful and instead proposes a "CARE" framework: critical, authorial, rhetorical, and educational--a nuanced approach emphasizing ethical and contextual AI use in technical writing classrooms. This framework aligns with plagiarism best practices, initially devised from when rhetoric and composition scholars considered the pedagogical implications of the Internet.

In the discipline of technical/professional writing and communication, one of the strongest recruiting tools we use is the potential earning power students will have once they obtain a degree and secure a job in the industry. This article is the result of two professors learning that one of their most advanced and dedicated students accepted, in her first job out of graduate school, a salary we thought was thousands below her earning potential. Our conversations around this student's situation led us to survey other alumni from our programs. What we have learned is that students often do not know what salaries they should expect, nor do they feel comfortable negotiating a salary offer. In addition, graduates' location (urban vs. rural) and level of education (BA or BS degree vs. MA) impact their earning potential.

Virtual teams have been adopted by organizations and studied for decades. However, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of technology-supported collaboration more than ever. This growing importance of virtual teamwork suggests that business education related to virtual team collaboration and communication is critical for students today, and universities play a significant role in equipping students with the knowledge and skillsets necessary to work in a digital world. This work reviews the literature on virtual teams and educational approaches used for teaching virtual team collaboration and communication and presents a framework for virtual team education. Survey findings and illustrative cases are gathered to demonstrate current virtual team education practices. The study concludes with recommendations for the education of virtual team knowledge and skills.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being used as a cost-effective assistant to human instructors to generate performance feedback for online learners. This study found that AI-generated feedback had a positive impact on students' writing practice in an online learning space. Underperforming students stated that they wanted AI to further assist them with their content development skills and use of sources. Although most AI feedback was text-based, the students with different learning styles concurred that AI-generated feedback helped improve their writing skills, metacognitive skills, and self-confidence, but not their creativity. Student-driven suggestions reflect their desire for AI assistants to provide meaningful feedback to online learners that is personalized to meet their needs and to help them develop ownership of their learning.

Soft skills development, such as communication, teamwork, and problem-solving, is critical for computer students as they enter the profession. Students may be able to practice these skills in a virtual setting through an online task-based course. In this study, we investigated how successfully an online task-based course encouraged the development of soft skills among computing students. The course was designed to give students real-world challenges that required them to work in groups and communicate effectively with their classmates and instructors. The inquiry was based on a qualitative examination of the students' final reports. It gave data from two semesters (Fall 2020 and Spring 2021) of students who studied a course named Technical Communication. In total, 216 students' final reports were ready for investigation. A sample of 97 reports, representing 45%, was selected based on certain criteria to ensure a high-quality investigation. According to the findings of our study, the online task-based course helped boost the development of certain soft skills among students. Students noted an improvement in their ability to communicate effectively, cooperate successfully with team members, and identify professional responsibilities, as well as a rise in their self-confidence. Overall, this study emphasizes the necessity of introducing online task-based courses into computing students' curricula, giving them a valuable opportunity to develop critical soft skills. The present design of the Technical Communication Course is believed to be efficient regardless of the education delivery method (traditional/online).

Technical writing skills allow prospective professionals to be competitive engineers, be effective at the workplace, reach high positions, and gain self-confidence in Agricultural Engineering. Therefore, technical writing is an integral part of English for Specific Purposes communication of prospective agricultural engineers. The current study aims to examine the influence of Online Writing Lab (OWL) resources on the development of students' technical writing skills. To achieve the outlined aim, a mixed research design was employed, which involved 58 Masters of Podillia State University. Two groups were formed based on students' preferences: experimental (n=28) and control (n=30). The Pearson criterion was used to process the results, which indicated that there was a statistically significant difference between the experimental and control groups in terms of their technical writing performances. The study has shown that using OWL resources positively influences the development of Master's technical writing skills. OWL can be considered an effective tool for teaching students technical writing. It engages and motivates the students in technical writing skills and further self-study. Additionally, the study revealed that the majority of the students have positive attitudes toward the use of OWL resources in the learning process.

How can we engage new engineering and computer science graduate students in meaningful conversations about research and publication ethics without establishing a common understanding of the issues and expectations? Most universities offer extensive responsible conduct of research (RCR) training programs, which are usually a semester-long. Absent a requirement, it is unlikely that engineering and computer graduate students and their advisors would prioritize a lengthy training during the student's first semester. Recognizing this, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas' Howard R. Hughes College of Engineering designed and implemented an introductory research ethics workshop for all graduate students entering engineering and computer science. We engaged an interdisciplinary team of faculty and staff in the workshop's design and implementation, and approached our design within the sensemaking framework for ethical decision-making. Each workshop included lecture content in four priority topic areas identified by the college faculty: research design and data ethics, publication ethics, computer coding ethics, and intellectual property. The workshops also included a face-to-face panel discussion with experts including engineering, computer science, and law professors; librarians; and technical writers. Our assessment showed that after completing the workshop, students demonstrated increased content knowledge, and their self-assessed expertise ratings were better aligned with their content knowledge.

EFL students' attitudes are crucial for the development of writing abilities, which in the age of cutting-edge technology depend extensively on artificial intelligence-mediated tools, and paraphrasing draws no exception. Therefore, this study aims to identify English as a foreign language student's enthusiasm and insights about utilizing QuillBot to improve their paraphrasing skills. To achieve the study objectives, the quasi-experimental design was employed. Thirty-one preparatory year students were recruited to answer a questionnaire and semi-structured interview having verified the validity and reliability of the instruments. The sample of the test demonstrated that students improved their performance in synonyms, sentence structure, and word choice. The respondents hold high enthusiasm and insights toward utilizing QuillBot to improve their paraphrasing skills. In addition, students had positive feelings about utilizing QuillBot to improve their paraphrasing skills. In light of the findings, the researchers recommended employing QuillBot in a writing class while learning paraphrasing skills.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between written and oral reasoning in an undergraduate chemistry laboratory course as part of an argument-based inquiry approach, which is also a generative learning environment, known as the Science Writing Heuristic (SWH). The study employed the data-transformation variant of convergent design of mixed-method research. Data sources included 180 laboratory reports from nine Pre-service Science Teachers (PSTs) and 20 video recordings across two semesters. Using Walton's argument schemes, PSTs' development, utilisation and correlation of written and oral reasoning and an argument cycle of premise-justification-conclusion were examined. A Friedman test and a Spearman-Brown correlation were conducted for statistical analysis. The results revealed that there is a positive correlation between written and oral reasoning. While the quality of PSTs' written reasoning significantly increased from the first time phase to the following time phases, this pattern was not observed in oral reasoning. An argument cycle of premise-justification-conclusion occurred in each phase of oral arguments. However, this cycle did not occur in every facet of the SWH process across all time phases in written arguments. The study suggests that pre-service science teachers should be provided with learning environments that will allow them to make external evaluations and engage in talking, reading and writing activities for learning purposes.

Although some studies have incorporated poetry into engineering courses, no studies exist that explore the use of writing poetry about technical topics to develop creative thinking skills in undergraduate engineering education. This study explores engineering students' perceptions of incorporating poetry writing within an upper-level discipline-specific engineering course. Two research questions are considered: (RQ1) Do students think that the poetry assignments will be beneficial to their careers? (RQ2) What beneficial gain, if any, do students report from the poetry assignments? Sixty-one students from an industrial and systems engineering course at the University of Florida completed a four-question, open-ended survey. Data were qualitatively coded and analyzed. For RQ1, 63.3% of participants considered the assignment beneficial to their future engineering careers, 13.3% did not see it as beneficial, and 23.3% were uncertain. For RQ2, 11 code categories and four themes emerged; three themes addressed benefits related to professional skills (creative thinking, problem-solving, communication) and one theme suggested the enhancement of technical skills via deepened conceptual knowledge acquisition. Poetry writing on technical topics has the potential to cultivate creative thinking skills in upper-level discipline-specific courses in undergraduate engineering education. Additional research is warranted.

This article offers a view on the emerging practice of managing external relations of the modern university, and the role of science communication in this. With a representative sample of research universities in four countries, we seek to broaden our understanding of the "science communication (SC) function" and its niche within the modern university. We distinguish science communication from corporate communication functions and examine how they distribute across organisational levels. We find that communication functions can be represented along a spectrum of (de)centralisation: public relations and marketing activities are more likely carried out at the central level (central offices), and public affairs and SC activities are more likely carried out at decentral levels (e.g. in specific offices and/or research institutes, departments). This study shows that little attention is paid to science communication at central structures, suggesting that it is not a practice that aligns easily with university corporate communication, yet SC might find its niche increasingly in decentral locations of activity.

Concerns about the role of technology and the quality of student writing in higher education are not new. Historically, writing scholars have been at the forefront of initiatives that scrutinise and integrate new technologies in higher education. This article contends that writing scholars are again uniquely equipped to assist students, teachers in all disciplines, and institutions of higher education in navigating the challenges created by the public availability of generative artificial intelligence (AI). Adopting a dialogical approach, the article brings together six scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds within the broad umbrella of writing studies. Through the lens of writing scholarship, this chorus of critical voices illuminates the important questions posed by, and possible responses to, AI in higher education. Although AI complicates key issues in higher education such as academic integrity, assessment, and authorship, writing scholarship provides an essential framework for educators to respond to these challenges. Collectively, these scholars map the history of writing scholars' responses to technological change in higher education and suggest how writing scholars can contribute to the debates and discussions concerning the impact of AI on higher education.

Using an evaluative approach within a professional communication service course, we used student documents and instructor feedback to uncover how students and instructors were understanding the rhetoric student learning outcome (SLO). Because rhetoric is central to the course, our driving questions were, Can we locate language that actualizes the rhetoric SLO in student documents? How does faculty feedback articulate the rhetoric SLO to facilitate effective revision? Overall, we found that whether identifying rhetoric in student documents or instructor feedback, the interpretation was varied and opens up room in pedagogical practices. We offer three implications for teaching: enhancing attention to teaching rhetoric, improving assignment design, and focusing on professional development for faculty.

Assessing text quality as an indication of underlying skills still remains challenging; irrespective of the approach, many studies struggle with reliability or validity problems. If writing is considered problem-solving, a report must make the reader understand the described situation and call for its mental reconstruction. Therefore, text quality may not only comprise linguistic aspects but also the cognitive-functional power of a text. The presented study aims at exploring the functionality of students' reporting texts in relation to general text-quality measures, using a corpus of accident reports written by German fifth- and ninth-graders (n = 277) prompted by a pictorial stimulus of a bike accident scenario. An online tool was developed in which 277 university students graphically reenacted the situation from one respective text according to the existence, position, and color of the involved elements. Thereafter, the match of the resulting spatial reconstructions with the original situation was assessed by two raters. While most subscales showed sufficiently high interrater reliabilities, the aggregated functionality score ([alpha] = 0.74) had medium-high correlations with other text-quality ratings and was comparably dependent on grade, education level, and linguistic family background. However, the correlational pattern, regression analysis, and factor analysis showed that the functionality score also contributed unique portions of variance to the assessment of writing skill that were not represented by rating measures. Moreover, the direct indication of whether a text allows for the reader's adequate cognitive representation is evident. Altogether, the approach of indicating text functionality through practical understanding offers a sound, though empirically laborious, alternative for text-quality measurement. Results are discussed with regard to the didactical strategy according to which students can improve their writing when they observe whether others can make use of their texts.

This article considers starting with an existing SIMIODE modeling scenario [Winkel, B. (2015). 1-031-CoolIt-ModelingScenario. SIMIODE (Version 2.0). "QUBES Educational Resources." https://doi.org/10.25334/3WG8-EC31] that develops Newton's law of cooling by considering data on the cooling of a beaker of water in a room, and expanding upon it to create a longer project modeling the temperature of a building with an internal heat pump that is also subject to a sinusoidal varying outside temperature. The proposed project was undertaken early on in the course, since little background was required, and a longer project format was utilised so that students could return to the project and see direct applications of new concepts, such as autonomous vs. nonautonomous ordinary differential equations, slope fields, and Euler's method as they were introduced. The project prompt is provided as well as a detailed discussion of the motivation behind the questions. Finally, the pros and cons of requiring the students to submit a written lab report for the project are reflected upon and a sample rubric is provided.

This study investigated the extent to which lexical repetition in English passages developed in a content management system appeared to affect reading comprehension. Participants were 65 graduate students at a Midwestern public university, all of whom were native English readers. Instruments were two passages adjusted to maximize or minimize internal lexical repetition. Readers rated repetitive texts as significantly more cohesive than nonrepetitive texts, although repetition did not significantly affect the accuracy of task-based responses. Participants named lexical cues that had been repeated but also named nonrepeated, memorable cues, suggesting possible future research into managed content, lexical memorableness, and reader comprehension.

Business communication teachers navigate a constantly changing pedagogical geography shaped by technology and breakthrough discoveries in linguistics, psychology, and neurobiology. "My Favorite Assignment" is designed to speed new teaching methods to the classroom. This article gives readers 11 teaching innovations on report writing, intercultural communication, and analysis and critical thinking debuted at the 2022 Association for Business Communication's (ABC) 87th Annual International Conference in Tampa, Florida, USA. Additional support materials--instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, and sample student projects--are downloadable from the ABC and DePaul University Center for Sales Leadership websites.

Background: The content presents a conceptually powerful and attractive framework for understanding the proposal development process to capture the complexity of the steps that contribute to successful grant writing. Based on experiences from 15 years in research administration and using real-life examples, the author juxtaposes the diverse roles required of grants professionals in creating a competitive grant application. In the context of increasing university emphasis on attracting extramural grant funding, this timely article focuses on proposal development skills using a step-by-step process including a sixpart analysis of each role within the framework, dividing the role into primary subtopics all highly relevant to each specific role. By deconstructing the art of grantsmanship, the whole suite of proposal development processes is considered with this approach with the intention that research development professionals will have solid actionable guidance in a cohesively planned delivery to capture the intricate mechanisms that translate to successful grantsmanship and acquire a set of tools to use to train grant seekers.

Syntactic complexity is a crucial aspect of linguistic proficiency and thus understanding and supporting such development in learners is a keen concern for language teachers. Research conducted has shown growing sophistication of noun phrase structures by writers of different abilities in academic writing (Biber & Gray, 2010; Liu & Li, 2016; Parkinson & Musgrave, 2014). In comparison, relatively less is known about the development of syntactic sophistication among student technical writers. Adopting a discipline-specific approach, this study compared the complexity of noun phrase structures in student texts of three performance levels from high, mid and low. The data taken from 45 technical reports of university engineering students were analyzed quantitatively using automatic syntactic analyzers and qualitatively by manual coding and text examination. The results show that noun phrase complexity is a differentiating factor for different performance levels with the stronger texts exemplifying more varied modifying structures and in greater numbers. Complex and lengthy structures, such as multiple use of prepositional phrases and combined use of other modifiers such as "-ed" or "-ing" clauses, are common in postmodification, whereas premodifying structures are simpler in structure and shorter. The study also explored the contribution of complex noun phrases to expression of meaning, showing that complex syntactic structures are commonly used to perform a diverse range of language functions essential to technical communication, such as explaining a scientific mechanism. The close connection between syntactic complexity and expression of meaning suggests that structures for pre-and postmodification should be learned as a meaning-making resource

Writing a research paper as a graduation requisite by university students is an important part of university education. It is not a simple task for most university students who face several problems during writing the graduation project. Several kinds of research have been conducted onrecognising the challenges and problems that face students in academic writing, but to the researcher's best knowledge, no study has been conducted on the problems faced in writing a graduate research paper by Jordanian undergraduate students of the English Language and Literature major. Therefore, the present study aimed to investigate the academic writing challenges and difficulties encountered in writing graduation papers by EFL undergraduate students in the Department of English at Alzaytoonah University of Jordan (ZUJ). The data for the study was collected through distributing a questionnaire of three parameters: attitude about writing a research paper, methodology challenges, and background knowledge about research. The questionnaire is based on identifying the causes of the students' challenges in writing their graduation papers. The respondents were 45 undergraduate students of the English Language and Literature. The findings revealed that the most important problems were lack of an academic prerequisite of teaching the techniques of how to write a research paper, lack of knowledge of research paper writing process, lack of resources, lack of the methodology, etc. Thus, for these reasons, the present study attempts to present suggestions and recommendations to overcome such hurdles faced by graduate students in writing their graduation research papers.

This paper emphasises on the needs analysis for the development of Technical Communication Pedagogical Module (TCPM) which could be adopted by the lecturers in skill-based higher learning institutions to teach technical communication. About 81% of the respondents indicated that fresh graduates lack communication skills. In addition, the total unemployment rate in June 2018 was recorded at 3.4%. Most of the employers as well as the graduates themselves reported that fresh graduates are unable to secure an employment due to poor communication skills. This raises the curiosity in determining the reasons for the ineffective course of study which supposed to be producing work-ready graduates. Therefore, before developing a technical communication pedagogical module which the educators could adopt to teach technical communication, it is crucial to determine lecturers' typical instructional strategies for teaching technical communication. Survey questionnaires were distributed to 30 lecturers and the findings revealed that most of the lecturers over-rated themselves for all the five aspects in the questionnaire which are (1) subject matter knowledge, (2) instructional planning and strategies, (3) assessment, (4) learning environment and (5) effective communication.

This article reports on a study investigating how computational essays can be used to help students in higher education STEM take up disciplinary epistemic agency--cognitive control and responsibility over one's own learning within the scientific disciplines. Computational essays are a genre of scientific writing that combine live, executable computer code with narrative text to present a computational model or analysis. The study took place across two contrasting university contexts: an interdisciplinary data science and modeling course at a large research university in the Midwestern United States, and a third-semester physics course at a large research university in Scandinavia. Over the course of a semester, computational essays were simultaneously and independently used in both courses, and comparable datasets of student artifacts and retrospective interviews were collected from both student populations. These data were analyzed using a framework that operationalized the construct of disciplinary epistemic agency across the dimensions of programming, inquiry, data analysis and modeling, and communication. Based on this analysis, we argue that computational essays can be a useful tool for fostering disciplinary epistemic agency within higher education science due to their combination of adaptability and disciplinary authenticity. However, we also argue that educational contexts, scaffolding, expectations, and student backgrounds can constrain and influence the ways in which students choose to take up epistemic agency.

This study examines the role of multimodality in facilitating service-learning goals. We report findings from qualitative interviews with 20 college instructors who have designed and facilitated multimodal community-engaged learning projects, identifying their motivations, goals, and the impact of these projects through reflections. Based on our qualitative analysis of these instructor responses, we discuss the technological and pedagogical implications of multimodal social advocacy projects in technical and professional writing courses.

Even though scientific communication and collaboration play critical roles in academic success, they often come in second to teaching laboratory fundamentals. COVID-19 associated capacity constraints forced our program to reexamine the traditional laboratory instruction paradigm by limiting physical attendance, as well as laboratory duration. Instead, we opted to turn these restrictions into opportunities to study peer-to-peer communication as a means to enhance in-person experimentation. Here, a two-week high performance liquid and gas chromatography (HPLC and GC) module uses centralized student communication between peer groups to not only maintain but increase quality laboratory experiences. Students rotate between two chromatography experiments to ensure each person gains exposure to foundational separations techniques. The module's first week focuses on method development, while the second week highlights method validation. Since HPLC and GC can accommodate similar experimental objectives, students receive comparable method development and validation experiences no matter which specific instrument they are assigned to that week. By integrating communication into the experimental process and adding peer accountability to the laboratory's design, the authors observed an increase in laboratory report words and figures when compared to the prior years' reports. Student questionnaires also indicated structured rotation and group communication increased student interest and investment in obtaining and reporting quality data.

This article presents a curated collection of 10 teaching innovations debued at the Association for Business Communication's 87th annual meeting held in Tampa, Florida, USA, and online October 2022. This "My Favorite Assignment" 27th edition introduces readers to classroom-ready ideas to help students gain personal and professional development, and a host of fresh assignment topics designed to invigorate both classic and new assignments. Teaching support materials--instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, Internet links, and sample student projects--are downloadable from the Association for Business Communication and DePaul University Center for Sales Leadership websites.

Although there is consensus in the literature that writing skills are important in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) studies, they are often neglected. However, some efforts have been made to correct this deficiency, one of them being the development of assessment rubrics. This study seeks to contribute to the discussion by presenting the results of the application of a rubric designed to assess the writing skills of a group of 3rd year engineering students. This rubric, which includes linguistic and rhetorical-organizational criteria alongside the mathematical and technical, was used to assess a number of written exercises and essays submitted by students in a 15-week course. The main interest of this study was to test the efficacy of the rubric as a diagnostic tool, conceived to detect the areas of improvement in the students' written performance and, ultimately, to also help them to achieve higher levels of competence. This goal was achieved, as one of the main conclusions of the study is that, although students usually master the technical aspects of the course, they must improve the linguistic and rhetorical aspects of their written communication. It can likewise be said that all the participants involved in the study profited in one way or another from the application of the rubric and contributed to identifying the ways in which the rubric itself can be improved for future application.

In science disciplines, students need sufficient and well-designed support to successfully gain writing competence along the different stages of their writing development. This study examines effective inquiry-based writing pedagogies and the contextualization of scientific writing instruction for supporting student writers in the scientific community. The researchers first systematically reviewed effective pedagogical practices that can help students gain writing competence through inquiry-based learning, then explicated how scientific writing is situated in inquiry-based writing instruction (IBWI) with respect to text structures using a genre-based approach. A systematic review of 40 empirical studies published between 2000 and 2021 was conducted. The researchers examined the pedagogies, methods, and models that effectively support IBWI and identified some emerging trends that aim to raise undergraduates' scientific writing communicative competence. Implications for how scientific writing should be situated in IBWI were provided to help disciplinary faculty respond more precisely to science students' writing needs in tertiary settings.

Instruction in cartographic or map literacy in technical communication courses can support pedagogies promoting social change. Students must develop an ability to read, understand, interpret, use, and critique maps in technical communication contexts. This article argues that attention to cartographic literacy can build on existing visual literacies to promote critical understanding of how to use and create maps that engage with issues related to social change. A description of a sample assignment is included to introduce cartographic literacy in undergraduate technical communication courses. Student map examples support the conclusion that students benefit from instruction in cartographic literacy and that cartographic literacy can be an important component of technical communication pedagogies that work toward social justice.

Undergraduate science degrees in South Africa seldom offer explicit courses focussing on improving the disciplinary writing skills required for effectively communicating scientific research. Similarly, most students entering the 'Honours' degree in Molecular Medicine at a South African university have not commonly been afforded opportunities to develop appropriate scientific writing and thinking skills. Aspiring to improve writing abilities, in 2017 we introduced a set of writing workshops involving iterative writing activities of scientific report sections with dialogic feedback from the facilitator. This study aimed to interrogate whether the workshops achieved the intended outcomes by conducting a post-course survey to ascertain the perceptions of the Molecular Medicine students. We also compared the grades awarded for the scientific reports in years before and since the implementation of the workshops. Students highlighted numerous ways that the workshops had improved their ability to write sections of a scientific report, while the average grade for the scientific report also increased significantly since the introduction of the workshops. These results reveal that the structure and activities of our workshops can teach scientific writing skills to early-postgraduate level bioscience students with relatively little disruption to the existing curriculum and help inform the format of future writing workshops.

This study aimed to investigate effects of adjunct model of content-based instruction on EFL students' technical report writing performance. A quasi-experimental design was employed to attain the main objective of the study. It included sixty-four mechanical engineering students in the control group (31) and experimental group (33). The experimental group participants were taught technical report writing skills using adjunct content-based instruction, and the control group participants were taught the same lesson through the conventional method for eight weeks. Writing tests and interviews were employed to collect the data. One-way MANOVA was applied to analyze the data collected using the tools. The findings revealed that the students participated in the adjunct EFL program outperformed the ones who were instructed through the conventional approach. They improved their skills of writing task achievement, cohesion and coherence, lexical resource, and grammatical range and accuracy significantly. The result also showed that the experimental group students had positive perceptions about adjunct content-based instruction in learning technical report writing. Based on the findings, it was recommended that adjunct content-based instruction could be incorporated into teaching technical report writing at colleges and universities.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to offer guidelines and recommendations for launching and running sustainable programs involving partnerships between industries and universities. Teaching technical writing and communication to fire and emergency services personnel is a task that requires forethought and intricate planning. The Advanced Technical Writing Certificate provided jointly by the Center for Public Safety Excellence and George Mason University balances the unique workplace needs of fire service professionals while working to ensure a high level of transfer and information retention. Design/methodology/approach: This study will describe how the authors have developed and run a successful course series. The methods used to structure the courses are explained in detail, alongside the pedagogical theories that shaped information delivery. This paper offers a detailed guide to program development and implementation. Findings: Providing a uniquely collaborative online environment and designing each module with the purpose of knowledge transfer have created an effective method by which advanced principles can be taught to working professionals in a relatively short period of time. By collaborating with subject matter experts and focusing on the utility of the material, the authors were able to create a highly effective course that served the needs of first responders. Practical implications: Using the steps detailed in the article, programs like this could be replicated, allowing greater access to workplace learners of all kinds and a pathway to sustainable programs like these in universities. The research also details the importance of an adaptive course that continues to grow and improve. Originality/value: By modeling the course and making use of experts, students are capable of learning complex topics with ease in a short amount of time.

The present study adopted a case-study qualitative design to discover how science undergraduates at one public university in the eastern U.S. understood writing and how they evaluated creative or personal writing in relation to their science identities. Findings suggest that science majors in this volunteer sample defined science writing as distinct from other kinds of writing, but they also saw creative writing as personally enjoyable and valuable. The discussion explores an observation that science educators may be able to leverage creative, imaginative writing to give students chances to demonstrate how creative narratives do not lie beyond the boundaries of scientific discourse, as well as for reflective and writing-to-learn purposes for students.

Institutions of higher education introduced professional writing classes as a way of preparing students for on-the-job-writing. To better accomplish the goal as well as to get a more consistent output from these classes that require the writing of a project proposal or report, writing teachers may want to incorporate "R.E.A.L." principles onto the "Find-Test-Deliver" pedagogical triangle that mark the three phases of their project writing courses. When R.E.A.L principles, where R stands for "Reader oriented," E for "Extensively researched," A for "Actionable solution," and L for "Looped composition," are used, the writing output becomes both academically sound and workplace appropriate. The article delves into the rationale behind the principles and proffers suggestions on how teachers could incorporate them into their teaching. It concludes that such an approach is a paradigm shift in professional writing instruction. First presented at the University of Maryland Global Campus's "Explore, Collaborate, Innovate" conference in 2017, the article grows out of the author's experiences and insights from being Marketing Director and Technical communicator at INFINITEE & other corporate houses as well as a Professor and content expert of business and technical writing courses at Rutgers University and other institutions of higher learning in the United States.

Recognizing a need to promote critical reading among students at our STEM university, the authors implemented an active reading strategy called double-entry notes across four general education writing and humanities courses. We hypothesized that the tool would help engage students in the critical reading strategies they tended to lack. The tool aimed to encourage students to think critically about assigned readings by analyzing texts, applying assigned readings to the world outside the text, synthesizing multiple texts, and the like. After assigning the tool, we assessed its effectiveness through a survey of students' perceptions and coded artifacts (N=182) for six markers of critical thinking. Results suggest that the tool succeeded in helping students to think critically about texts but that some markers of critical thinking were more consistent than others. Also, students' perceptions of the double-entry notes' benefits did not align with our findings based on analysis of their texts. Because results revealed critical engagement in reading, we plan to continue the study, adjusting the tool to address more specific critical thinking strategies.

This article describes a course design that offers an innovative approach to using client-based projects (CBPs) in technical and professional writing. It shows how teachers can incorporate CBPs in hybrid or fully virtual instruction, adapt it for a quarter or semester, and tailor it to meet students' needs. While there are standard writing assignments, such as letters, memos, progress reports, and job application materials, other writing activities assigned depend on the CBP. These projects can involve creating operation manuals, employee handbooks, event planning guides, rewriting gaming instructions, summarizing scientific reports, producing website content, and/or compiling annotated bibliographies. First, CBPs foster students' different talents and abilities and provide different ways to improve communication skills, allowing students to pursue their writing interests across a range of disciplines. Secondly, this course has broad enough goals to support CBP integration. This course was designed around three such broad goals: (1) composing in professionally appropriate modes; (2) understanding professional obligations and ethical behaviors in diverse situations; and (3) working individually and collaboratively. Finally, the learning objectives for each goal are flexible, thus providing both instructor and student with an open framework for pursuing client-based work.

Writing a lab report can be an opportunity for students to engage in scientific thinking. Yet students' lab reports often do not exhibit evidence of such engagement. Students' writing can appear focused on "filling in" required components and reporting on predetermined conclusions. We conducted a design experiment in an introductory biology laboratory course and examined the impact on students' engagement in argumentation in lab reports. Over two design iterations, students' arguments more often considered and integrated multiple claims, included a broader range of evidence and ideas, and gave appropriate attention to uncertainty in conclusions. We argue that two interrelated changes to the design of the lab course made these shifts possible. First, we restructured the role of instructors to position them as an audience interested in students' thinking. Second, we introduced more uncertainty into the lab activities to provoke consideration of multiple interpretations. We propose that these changes created a different "rhetorical context" that helped motivate and shape students' engagement in argumentation. More broadly, we suggest that an important alternative to explicitly scaffolding knowledge and skills is to design learning environments that can inspire students to engage in a range of scientific practices more authentically.

Students always need sincere and kind guidance from the teachers. Hence, a true customer orientation is instrumental in teaching English as it is always good to understand the students' needs to improve their performance. This paper addresses the requirement to understand the students' needs and then teach accordingly to improve the quality of the Malaysian University English Test (MUET) report-writing. A class-room based experiment was done on 40 students in a government school. The students were briefed on the requirements for report writing in MUET. There were experimental and control groups in this study. This research found that the format-driven teaching (FBT) had significantly improved the writing performance of the MUET students. The results indicated that the overall mean score of the students before the FBT teaching stood at 18.50 (out of maximum 40.00), but the score significantly increased to 23.95 after the students were briefed and taught based on the format and requirements of the report-writing. The quality of their writings was much better than before. This research suggested the need of putting the interests of the students first in teaching. The students might have different needs such as not knowing the expectations of the examiners or teachers. Implications and direction for future research were also discussed.

This study was carried out to determine the opinions of the pre-service primary teachers about the laboratory report writing in laboratory courses. Data were collected by using an open-ended questionnaire. The sampling of the study consists of 68 pre-service primary teachers who situated at a public university in the northeast of Turkey. Data were analyzed using content analysis. Two faculty members and one teacher jointly assessed the responses of the pre-service primary teachers to the questionnaire and determined the themes and codes for each question. The results showed that the pre-service primary teachers in the study paid attention to the content while writing laboratory report in the laboratory course. Also, they had positive and negative opinions about the contribution of laboratory report on their learning. Some of the preservice primary teachers stated that writing a laboratory report had positive effects such as providing learning, encouraging thinking, reinforcing what was learned, increasing interest and attention towards the lesson, and ensuring the permanence of the concepts learned. Some of the pre-service primary teachers thought that writing reports had a negative effect such as being boring and not contributing to the development of the individual. In addition, it was determined that performing a laboratory report reduced the students' interest in the course and pre-service primary teachers did not want to write a laboratory report. However, pre-service primary teachers accept that laboratory report increases their ability to comment.

This article follows up on the conversation about new streams of approaches in technical communication and user experience (UX) design, i.e., design thinking, content strategy, and artificial intelligence (AI), which afford implications for professional practice. By extending such implications to technical communication pedagogy, we aim to demonstrate the importance of paying attention to these streams in our programmatic development and provide strategies for doing so.

Though the remote internship is certainly not a new phenomenon, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the growth of this model for undergraduate experiential learning. As we consider this shift, we must evaluate how to best assist students completing remote internships. In this article, we argue that infrastructure offers a useful framework for understanding students' internship experience and corresponding professionalization. We present two case studies of student remote internship experiences, analyzing areas of challenge and success through the infrastructural areas of writing projects, communication, and logistics. We offer recommendations for faculty working with remote student interns to promote positive learning experiences.

While writing is a critical part of the medical profession, longitudinal studies exploring the social apprenticeship and genre knowledge development of medical practitioners are almost nonexistent. Through interviews and writing samples, this article traces a 10-year journey of one writer's engagement with the Patient SOAP note, following his experiences from the first year of his undergraduate education to the end of medical school. Drawing upon theories of social apprenticeship and the RIME framework (reporter, interpreter, mediator, educator) from the field of medicine, we offer an in-depth case study of our focal participant's growing medical expertise as he masters the Patient SOAP note. Through this in-depth analysis, we argue that the SOAP note functions as a "threshold genre" to assist entry into the medical profession. We conclude by offering additional evidence about the role that key threshold genres play in the development of professional expertise and offer implications for genre theory.

Engineers, being hands-on experts, need to produce technical documents that are convincing to colleagues, executives, and clients. This study analyzes different technical documents written by engineers and offers instruction on how to approach the task of technical writing. The quantitative part of the study involved gathering statistics on the types of documents most frequently written by engineers and the importance engineers assign to technical writing in their career. The study participants consisted of 60 engineers selected through a snowball sampling method. Data was collected through the use of a questionnaire. The results of the data are presented in frequencies and percentages. An analysis of the data reveals that engineers currently practicing in Saudi Arabia believe writing to be important in their field. In total, 66.7% believe writing to be "very important," whereas the remaining 33.3% believe it to be "important"; none of the respondents believe writing to be only "slightly important" or "not important." When asked whether their background education in the engineering field adequately prepared them for writing on the job, only 30 (50%) were confident of their writing abilities following their engineering degrees. The other 30 (50%), although they found their skills in technical writing to be useful, were not confident of its adequacy in the workplace. Given the option of selecting more than one answer, respondents recorded the following frequencies for the type of writing they usually do at work: 40 out of 60 respondents (6.7%) stated that they frequently write interim or progress reports; 30 (50%) stated that they write final or recommendation reports. However, only 10 (16.7%) of the respondents revealed that they often write more focused reports, such laboratory reports. Engineers also write a fair number of non-report documents, including memos, emails, and logbook entries.

Tackling environmental and sustainability issues has grown in popularity in writing courses. Yet, for teachers designing professional and technical writing classes, what are the benefits and drawbacks in asking students to interact with place-based discourses in their digital compositions, including blogs? How does implementing an ecocomposition curriculum and sustainability topics in professional and technical writing courses affect students' research, digital writing, collaborative, and critical-thinking outcomes, along with influencing their personal and larger goals? This article discusses a four-year case study at a Southwestern university of an experimental course assignment's design, and it involves 252 students, including many Native Americans. Students engaged with environmental themes and ecocomposition methods in an upper-division class. This article includes a description of the class's major assignment, a blog site and reflective essay, and the blog's assessment criteria, with raters measuring the blog's writing outcomes. Overall, employing ecocomposition practices within the blog assignment unit provided students with a relevant curriculum, assisting them in conducting research for a blog space; writing digitally and thinking critically about diverse spaces related to their backgrounds, majors, and futures; and forging ties with classmates and potential outside audiences. The study's results have implications for implementing ecocomposition design in writing classes.