Audience Awareness: Leveraging Problem-Based ... - IEEE Xplore

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION, VOL. 49, NO. 2, JUNE 2006

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Audience Awareness: Leveraging Problem-Based Learning to Teach Workplace Communication Practices Tutorial

—Feature by MARIE C. PARETTI Abstract—Research on the transition from school to work suggests that students entering the workplace struggle to adapt their writing and speaking to individual audiences. To address this problem, the article presents principles for using problem-based learning to design assignments that teach students to tailor communication to the needs of audiences. The approach focuses not on specific workplace documents but on the higher order workplace practice of effectively connecting documents and presentations to audience needs, and designing communication accordingly. A two-year study of capstone design courses suggests that the approach encourages students to explicitly consider audience needs when composing.

Index Terms—Assignment design, engineering communication, problem-based learning, student-centered pedagogy, technical communication, technical writing, workplace communication.

RATIONALE: LEARNING TO TAILOR TEXTS TO MEET THE INFORMATION NEEDS OF AUDIENCES

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nformation is the critical currency of the contemporary workplace, and those who know how to exchange it effectively are often those who thrive. At the heart of successful information exchange is the ability of the writer to adapt a document or presentation to the needs of the audience. It is, however, this central workplace practice that remains elusive, if not invisible, to students. Too often communication assignments, particularly in disciplinary courses, focus on content and format to the exclusion of the higher level analytical skills needed to connect that content and format with the needs of specific audiences seeking to accomplish specific tasks. As a result, students enter the workplace armed with format knowledge but bereft of the rhetorical sophistication needed to tailor those formats to the people they communicate with. To engineering faculty already struggling to cover the necessary technical content, however, adding another layer of instruction becomes an almost impossible burden. One solution, I argue, is not to add but to redesign communication assignments and evaluations in ways that foreground the real needs of specific, concrete audiences and thus foster the necessary analytical skills. In doing so, faculty can more effectively prepare students for workplace communication by creating a space in which needed Manuscript received July 20, 2005; revised November 27, 2005. The author is with the Department of Engineering Education, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA 24061 USA (email: [email protected]). IEEE DOI 10.1109/TPC.2006.875083 0361-1434/$20.00 © 2006 IEEE

information is exchanged between student and instructor, and the student learns to tailor documents to meet needs. Student-centered pedagogies such as problem-based learning provide ideal vehicles for such a redesign because they transform the instructor from all-knowing lecturer and evaluator to engaged participant and mentor. This approach has been implemented successfully in two separate senior design courses over two years, with student outcomes showing significant gains in audience awareness. Defining the Problem: The Nature of School Versus Workplace Audiences As many scholars have noted, one of the major stumbling blocks students face in transferring communication skills from the classroom to the workplace is the difference between using texts in school (written and oral) to perform knowledge so that teachers can evaluate concept mastery and using texts at work to communicate information so that audiences can take subsequent actions. As early as 1965, W. Earl Britton framed the problem as follows: …[the student] writes about a subject he [sic] is not thoroughly informed upon, in order to exhibit his knowledge rather than explain something the reader does not understand, and he writes to a professor who already knows more than he does about the matter and who evaluates the papers not in terms of what he has derived, but in terms of what he thinks the writer knows. In every respect, this is the converse of what happens in professional life, where the writer is the authority; he writes to transmit new or unfamiliar information to someone who does not know but needs to, and who evaluates the paper in terms of what he derives and understands. [1, p. 113, emphasis added].

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As faculty, we do not need the information students possess; we simply need to know that they possess it. Thus in school we have students write lab reports to demonstrate that they understand the lab’s theoretical concepts, can perform the techniques appropriately, and can analyze the results in terms appropriate to the discipline. At work, in contrast, the audiences care about the information in a very different way. Engineers write lab reports to explain test results for managers or clients who make decisions based on the outcomes. Effective workplace practice means being able to tailor such reports to the needs of the readers in question. The resulting disjunction is fundamentally a problem of audience. In essence, all faculty audiences are the same: we evaluate the knowledge our students perform. The academic framework rarely affords students opportunities to explicitly connect the content, organization, tone, and visual design of their work to the real information needs of their audiences. It is worth noting that many students make such connections tacitly when they write “what the teacher wants” and treat “good” writing as subjective. Rather than dispelling such ideas, learning theories regarding students’ use of prior knowledge suggest building on these tacit practices when introducing explicit audience analysis as critical in communication design. Knowledge Transfer: Studies of Students Moving From School to Work While writing assignments have come a long way since 1965, ongoing research by scholars such as A. Freedman, C. Adams, and G. Smart [2], [3]; D. Winsor [4]; D. P. Dannels [5]; D. Russell [6]; C. Anson and L. Forsberg [7]; and others makes it clear that the disjunctions between school and work Britton noted remain, as do student struggles to transfer communication skills from one arena to the other. A 1994 study by Freedman, Adams, and Smart, for example, noted that “Even in courses where the instructor is directly simulating a workplace task through a factually-based case study, the nature of the writing is fundamentally different because of the radical differences between the two rhetorical contexts” [2, p. 395]. Similarly, Winsor’s 1996 study of engineering students detailed the struggles novice writers have with the distinction between work and school. For instance, in examining an interaction between a professional engineer and a co-op student regarding a test report the student wrote, Winsor noted that the student “anticipated an audience that would evaluate his text based on its correctness” [4, p. 25]. As a result, he “identified all wording changes as grammar corrections, whereas [the engineer] saw the changes in terms both of allowing his audience to take a certain action and of maintaining the interaction between his own company and the customer audience” [4, p. 26]. Dannels noted related disjunctions in her 2003 study

of presentations in capstone design courses; although the presentations were modeled on workplace norms, students and faculty alike knew the presentations needed to demonstrate students’ mastery of the design process itself and that the fundamental goal was grading, not informing. Thus even though the assignments were designed to simulate workplace practices, in reality, the students understood them as primarily school-based writing to perform for, not exchange information with, an audience. In short, while faculty routinely develop assignments that reflect common workplace documents such as proposals, progress reports, and design specifications, we do not develop assignments that enable students to enact the critical workplace practice of adapting those formats to the needs of individual audiences. Consequently, students master formats but struggle to successfully adapt the content, organization, tone, and design of those formats to the specific needs of the situation—and thus fail to communicate effectively in the workplace [3], [7].

PEDAGOGY: DESIGNING ASSIGNMENTS AROUND THE INFORMATION NEEDS OF AUDIENCES Work in technical communication pedagogy suggests that service-learning and client-based models are among the most effective approaches for helping students understand how audience needs shape workplace communication practices. In such cases, students communicate directly not only with faculty who grade them but with clients who act on the information and products they supply. The approach helps students understand how the needs of specific audiences influence and alter generic textbook guidelines for common workplace documents [8], [9]. But while this real-world approach improves students’ ability to understand texts as sites of information exchange between writer and audience, and facilitates transfer of effective communication practices from school to work, it also places significant demands on faculty in terms of classroom management [8]–[11]. Locating community or industry partners, mediating between students and these client organizations, balancing organizational versus academic timelines, and related management issues often preclude successful implementation. Where service-learning and client-based models are not feasible, I argue that faculty can use student-centered pedagogies to create (not simulate) similar exchanges based on information needs [12], [13]. Though faculty still evaluate content mastery in these scenarios, as they move from expert imparting knowledge to mentor guiding students through self-directed learning, faculty also need information regarding students’ progress to successfully manage and mentor the learning. By using these needs as the basis for communication assignments, faculty can

PARETTI: AUDIENCE AWARENESS: LEVERAGING PROBLEM-BASED LEARNING

leverage the benefits of student-centered learning to enhance students’ understanding of audience needs and their ability to tailor communication accordingly. Moreover, even in courses that use service-learning or client projects, the principles outlined in this article can help faculty design assignments that more explicitly foreground the needs of all audiences (including course instructors) and connect those needs directly to specific elements in the documents and presentations. The goal of this approach, then, is not to make academic assignments precisely mirror workplace documents and presentations (products) but rather to make explicit for students the ways in which, in any communication situation, the needs of the audience drive the content, organization, and design of those products (practice). Problem-Based Learning as Site for Information Exchange Within student-centered teaching, recent research highlights problem-based learning (PBL) as a particularly productive model for engineering education [14]–[20]. However, much of this research focuses on gains in technical knowledge. Virtually no work to date addresses the potential gains in rhetorical development inherent in the information exchange between faculty-as-mentor/managers and students-as-novice-engineer/learners. Yet the PBL framework creates a situation in which faculty need information from students to effectively mentor the learning process, making it an ideal site for helping students develop the kind of audience awareness necessary to successful workplace communication. The information needs of faculty in a PBL setting are perhaps most apparent in open-ended design problems. To successfully mentor students through the design project, faculty require information about the project’s progress that they do not know, much the way workplace supervisors need information to make management decisions. Faculty often begin by making sure students have defined a design project that can reasonably be addressed within the course time frame. Even when the projects are given (e.g., ongoing department projects or national contest problems), faculty must still insure that students develop a reasonable project plan and a viable schedule for completing the project on time. Throughout the course, faculty must monitor the students’ progress to insure that they are drawing on appropriate engineering knowledge, searching the literature as needed, working effectively in teams as well as in individual roles, and making reasonable progress toward project completion. Such information is critical to effectively guiding students through the learning process; faculty need to know where students are struggling in order to to help direct student efforts. These information needs make the PBL-based design course an ideal site to develop assignments

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that engage students in the process of exchanging information with managers who will use that information to make subsequent decisions. Students’ documents and presentations can function as tools that faculty use to determine appropriate interventions. As students come to see their texts as functional information exchanges, they begin to develop workplace practices that move beyond following formats to designing communication that effectively meets audience needs, even if the particular needs are those of academic faculty. Moreover, such practices can be fostered through the kinds of assignments already common in many design courses: proposals, progress reports, and final reports. Introducing Workplace Practices: Designing Assignments to Foster Audience Awareness Although faculty can often use the same assignments currently in place in their PBL-based design courses, fostering the workplace practice of tailoring documents to audiences requires explicit attention to this practice in the design, teaching, and evaluation of those assignments. The following principles are critical in this process: • Design communication assignments that reflect faculty’s real information needs with respect to both managing student projects and assessing student learning. As noted, the goal is not to imitate the exact form such documents take in the workplace or to mask the contradictions between academic and industry environments. Instead, by highlighting the specific information faculty need to both manage and evaluate projects, well-designed assignments help students understand the ways audience needs shape texts. Content, organization, and document design become functions of how the audience uses the information, rather than decontextualized rules. • In written handouts, classroom lectures, and grading criteria, describe the assignments in ways that make those needs and any associated constraints explicit to students, detailing both why faculty need the information and how they plan to use it. To learn the ways in which the audience’s need for information impacts communication design, students need to see faculty using that information in meaningful ways. • Actively engage students in the process of structuring and organizing documents to address audience needs rather than simply providing a template for students to mimic. By having students develop documents and presentations based on the defined audience, faculty engage students in the process of critical thinking necessary to move from one communication situation to another. In fostering

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such engagement, faculty can provide two or three sample documents that take different, yet equally successful, approaches to minimize students’ tendencies to copy the example. These principles can also be extended to include assignments designed to enable students to share information with each other for specific purposes. Students, as well as faculty, can function as real audiences in the classroom when they are explicitly engaged in using the information provided by their peers in a meaningful (rather than simulated) way.

one MSE project served an industry client, and in 2004–2005, two ESM projects served industry clients. As in many capstone projects, while students are expected to bring all their previous learning to bear, they do not know everything they need; the projects require archival research to acquire new skills and information to supplement previous learning.

This approach was implemented and evaluated in year-long (two-semester) capstone design courses, one in Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) and one in Engineering Science and Mechanics (ESM), during the 2003–2004 (Study Year 1—base data) and 2004–2005 (Study Year 2) academic years. Course sizes are small (16–19 students/department). Students work in self-selected groups of 2–5, with 6–10 projects per course. Each group has a faculty advisor who directs the technical work, and the departments provide limited funding for each project (sometimes supplemented by advisor funds). In addition, students attend class twice a week in the fall and once a week in the spring; teams are taught by a technical communications professor (myself) and an engineering professor from the relevant department. In Year 1, the study included 18 projects (8 in the MSE course and 10 in the ESM course), while in Year 2, it included 14 projects (8 in the MSE course and 6 in the ESM course).

Because the courses operate in a PBL framework, the engineering faculty and I act as project mentors/managers, and classroom time focuses on project management. Early fall-semester classes include lectures and discussion regarding project planning, proposal development, presentation strategies, and reporting results. As the projects develop, class time shifts to formal presentations and informal discussion of progress to enable students to solicit feedback from peers and faculty. Each team communicates with the course faculty, the project advisors, and the other teams through a range of assignments focused on exchanging needed information: • Project proposals help faculty insure that (a) the problem is appropriate for a capstone design course with respect to ABET criteria and (b) the team understands the problem, has defined measurable deliverables, and has a work plan likely to lead to success. • Written and oral progress reports (a) bring faculty up to date on the project’s progress for management purposes, (b) solicit feedback from peers and faculty concerning preliminary designs, test results, problems, and related concerns, and (c) identify work done by individual team members for grading purposes. • Final written reports explain outcomes to faculty, advisors, and, if applicable, external audiences such as contest judges or industry partners. The format for these reports is not fixed; although we discuss common report patterns, each team develops a structure appropriate to the project itself (e.g., design report, recommendation, journal article). • Final oral reports presented to the entire department (faculty, graduate students, and the rising junior class) (a) demonstrate to these stakeholders that the students have completed the course goals and satisfied ABET Criterion 3 and (b) introduce the upcoming class to expectations regarding capstone design. Because these reports address a common audience for a common goal, they all follow similar patterns, though we still allow students substantial flexibility.

Within these capstone experiences, students address open-ended design problems in their disciplines. Projects are often connected to faculty research; occasionally they address national contest problems. Most are not client-based, though in 2003–2004,

All documents and presentations are collaborative (i.e., one per group), and in each case, the assignment foregrounds the needs of the audiences and connects the content and structure to those needs. Each assignment represents a percentage of the

As noted, these principles are readily applied in open-ended design courses, but they apply equally well in other courses in which faculty use student-centered pedagogies. At the heart of the principles is an assignment design focused on useful information exchanges between faculty and students (or among students) that explicitly tie content, organization, and document design to the needs and interests of audiences. The goal of such assignments is not to simulate workplace products (specific formats for documents and presentations), but to engage students realistically in the workplace practice of creating texts to meet real needs. The following section illustrates these principles in action through a case study of two senior-level capstone design courses.

IMPLEMENTATION: AUDIENCE-BASED COMMUNICATION IN TWO CAPSTONE DESIGN COURSES


course grade (typically 5%–15% per document or presentation); the remainder of a student’s grade is based on the project’s progress (10%–15%), his or her individual contribution (5%–15%), and the advisor’s input (15%–30%). Importantly, these assignments are critical tools for managing the course and evaluating student performance. The progress reports, for instance, help us evaluate the progress students are making, the team dynamics, and the contributions of each member. Accordingly, both the assignments and the grading rubrics describe how we use the texts to manage and evaluate the projects and the students’ learning and are designed both to facilitate those activities and teach students to create texts based on audience needs. The progress report assignment illustrates this approach, applying the principles of assignment design and evaluation outlined in the previous

Fig. 1.

Sample progress report assignment.

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section. (The assignments described here are revised for the 2005–2006 academic year based on the results of Year 2.) Throughout the year, students submit written reports to the course coordinators and formally present their progress to the class. As noted above, the written reports provide faculty with documentation regarding the students’ progress, their ability to apply engineering expertise to the project, the contributions of individual members, their spending to date, and any problems and resulting needs or modifications. The presentations allow students to solicit feedback from their peers. We expect the student audience to behave as professional colleagues, posing possible solutions to problems and asking questions to help the presenters refine their design at each stage. To engage students in the process of using audience needs to develop documents and presentations, the assignment specifies the ways these audiences use the information, as illustrated in Fig. 1.

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The assignment begins by explaining the ways the audience will use the documents and presentations, and it directly connects the requested content to those uses. Moreover, it encourages students to design the written documents to make the needed information easily accessible to the audiences. To emphasize these issues in class, we discuss the role of progress reports in the workplace, note that the details we ask for may not all be relevant to an industry manager, and ask the class to brainstorm content, organization, and design before looking at samples.

Fig. 2.

Sample grading rubric for written progress report.

Finally, the grading rubrics support the teaching of audience awareness by focusing on how well the reports enable the intended audiences to do their jobs, as the rubric for the written progress report (Fig. 2) shows. Note that several criteria explain why such information belongs in the report and what we as readers need to do with it. Each criterion is evaluated as meeting one of five conditions: Excellent (immediately usable as is), Good (generally usable, though minor revisions would help), Average (contains most of the appropriate information, but needs revision to be usable), Poor


(attempts but fails to address audience needs in this area), or Not Done. The document receives a holistic grade based on its overall ability to meet the defined needs of the audience. Comments on the reports then address both specific issues of style and clarity (conciseness, level of detail, transitions), and, equally important, managerial issues associated with the project. In responding to a given report, for instance, in addition to circling wordy sentences or noting slang phrases, I might make marginal comments that suggest talking to other groups who have resolved similar problems, recommend faculty with expertise the group may find useful, point to missing information I need to understand the implications of their data, or ask questions about the status of any key tasks not mentioned in the report. Often I make such comments verbally as well the next time I see students, making the text an active part of the course. My engineering counterparts similarly focus on project management issues in responding to these reports, suggesting resources, pushing design decisions, and engaging directly with the content at hand. Each assignment takes a similar approach, stressing how the audience will use the information, and how the document or presentation should facilitate that use. The cumulative effect is a series of assignments that encourage students to move from treating texts as vehicles to perform knowledge toward using them as tools to exchange information. Although the assignments parallel workplace documents, the pedagogical emphasis is on the workplace practice of designing information to meet audience needs.

OUTCOMES: STUDENT GAINS IN WORKPLACE PRACTICES REGARDING AUDIENCE Evaluation Methods The impact of this approach on student learning was evaluated using several strategies: • Student surveys in Year 1 and Year 2 of the capstone course (capstone surveys) regarding how useful the students found various assignments with respect to completing their projects and how valuable they believed them to be with respect to their future careers (many students learn industry expectations through co-op, internship, or related workplace experience). • Interviews with 8 students (5 from MSE and 3 from ESM) at the conclusion of the Spring 2005 semester regarding the composing process, perceptions about audience, and ways the texts helped or hindered the design project. To protect students’ anonymity during the course, these interviews were conducted by a research assistant on a voluntary basis; as the teacher–researcher, I did not know the identity

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of the interviewees, nor did I read the interview transcripts until the course ended. • Independent exit surveys conducted by the MSE department with all graduating seniors. These annual surveys address the entire curriculum, including capstone design. In addition, I conducted informal interviews with faculty at the end of the MSE presentations. Improvements in Audience Awareness The results show notable gains in audience awareness. Student comments on open-ended questions in the capstone surveys and in the interviews, in particular, reflected a strong understanding of workplace communication and, most importantly, of audience as a key factor in composing. As one student explained on the survey, Generally, I interpreted the entire class as how things would be done in the real world. I learned a lot from writing the technical paper that has to be submitted to managers, wrote another. Similar comments across the capstone surveys reflect the professional atmosphere created by the emphasis on information exchanged among managers and coworkers. More detailed comments, transcribed from the interviews, point specifically to audience awareness as students describe composing written reports and presentations: I have noticed, it’s not like we are just throwing things together anymore. I have noticed consciously thinking all right, this is who we are talking to with this… The oral progress reports, you not only have to think about how to translate what you wrote onto a PowerPoint and figure out how to present it in a way so that people you are actually working at writing to can understand it so that when you are looking at them you can actually see a nod instead of a question on their face. [Audience] affected how we went from the very first presentation, which was our project overview in the fall, how the audience reacted to our presentations basically dictated how we presented our work whether orally or written the rest of the time even up to our final because initially they were … getting hung up on a certain aspect of our presentation …. [I]t was confusing them about the main goal of our project. From that point on we decided to leave that [confusing point] out or leave it as a side note. I went and saw a few of the [final] presentations last year … and it seemed like there were a couple of professors in particular that seemed to put an effort into asking questions. Just some for the sake of actually just asking questions and testing the people and some because they were actually interested. So, I think we focused it [composing] more on the presentations themselves and oral reports as to say, “Okay, what could they ask us here, what could we have here in case they do

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ask us?” and hopefully that has gone back into the report. These comments suggest that as the course progressed, students became increasingly conscious of providing useful information in a way that reached beyond simply “knowing what the teacher wanted,” though several interview subjects did note, as one put it, “Marie was always in the back of our mind whenever we were writing anything.” The tone of such comments in the interviews reflects a tension between seeing me as grader and seeing me as a mentor/manager, and I was “in the back of their minds” in both ways. For example, when asked about what they thought the course instructors actually did with the reports, one student explained, “I wouldn’t say they just graded it, but I think they graded it in a way that would help us out a lot” on the project. That is, students saw our comments addressing both the mechanics of their communication and the larger issues of successfully completing their projects. Anecdotal evidence also suggests students see me as more than an evaluator; they often stop by my office or catch me in the hall to update me—letting me know that materials on order have arrived, showing me samples created in the lab, explaining test results, or asking advice regarding difficult teammates or advisors. The interviews point, in particular, to gains in audience awareness resulting specifically from the presentations, in which students shared their work with a wider audience of peers and faculty and, importantly, that audience entered into substantive dialogue about the project in response. Students moved from including anything to demonstrate that they had done something to selecting information appropriate to audience interests. Their descriptions of the composing process thus indicate that they have learned the kinds of questions to ask as they assemble reports and presentations. The remaining evaluation methods focused on overall student learning, performance, and perceived satisfaction. The most dominant learning gains occurred with respect to project definition and project management. I have reported details of these gains elsewhere [21]; in short, the assignment sequence appears to have played a key role in students’ ability to grasp the scope of the work and the tasks needed to complete it, plan and manage those tasks across the team, and keep the projects on track. Perhaps most notably, the independent exit surveys indicated that although the number of communication assignments in the course increased, student satisfaction with the value of the course also increased substantially. Limitations While the interviews and survey results did show significant impact with respect to students’ abilities to think through questions of audience

as they composed, several interview subjects also pointed to two key areas for improvement: (1) Students still struggle with the amount of communication required in the engineering workplace. Several mentioned wanting more lab time to work on projects rather than reports. Yet even those concerned about time acknowledged that the class mirrors “real life” (particularly as observed through co-op or internship positions). In addition, even as they expressed concern about the amount of writing, they considered the reports useful for staying on task and avoiding long nights at the eleventh hour. Addressing this tension may involve revising the number of written versus oral reports, in conjunction with further discussions about the role such texts play in the workplace and the average balance of communication to design in the workplace. (2) Even in the PBL framework, the course instructor, while a mentor and manager, still ultimately represents grading authority, and students continue to “write for the teacher” to some degree, as noted earlier. Such practices may not, however, be ineffective provided students are conscious, as the interview data suggests they were, of that process as an explicitly analytical one that continues beyond the classroom. Consequently, “overcoming” this limitation is less appropriate, pedagogically, than exposing it. That is, as suggested by the model described here, the way out is not to mask the instructor’s role and needs, but to increasingly foreground it, particularly with respect to how it influences the content, organization, tone, and design of the information exchanged between project teams and their faculty–managers.

IMPLICATIONS: TEACHING STUDENTS TRANSFERABLE WORKPLACE COMMUNICATION PRACTICES Research on the transfer of communication skills from school to work suggests that one of the key barriers students face is the shift from using writing and presenting to perform knowledge for an evaluator to using communication as a means to exchange critical information with audiences. Students entering the workplace typically struggle with how to adapt their communication to the needs of the audience at hand, even if they are familiar with common workplace documents. To address this problem, the model presented here describes a means of leveraging problem-based learning to engage students in the critical workplace practice of designing communication to meet audience needs, regardless of whether the audience is a teacher, a


manager, a client, a technician, or a colleague. Rather than addressing a particular kind of document that may or may not transfer from one environment to another, the approach is designed to help students learn to ask more fundamental questions: Who is this for? What will they do with it? How can I design it to meet their needs? Such teaching and learning requires three key elements: • Assignments should be designed to meet real faculty needs with respect to managing and evaluating student work. That is, they should ask students to communicate information that faculty will find meaningful and useful in the context of mentoring students. • Assignments, lectures, and grading rubrics should make those needs explicit and clearly connect the content, format, structure, and related details of each text to those needs. • Classroom practices should engage students in the process of designing such texts rather than simply following prescribed formats.

The key, then, for faculty seeking to improve students’ ability to communicate is to address the higher level workplace practice of adapting documents and presentations to specific audiences. By intentionally

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designing, teaching, and evaluating assignments in the ways described here, faculty can explicitly engage students not in mastering a particular format but in designing information to meet the needs of any audience. Such assignments succeed by enabling students to make connections between material products (documents or presentations) and the ways audiences use those products. In doing so, faculty can help students learn to communicate effectively by fostering the kind of critical analytical thinking central to successful workplace practice.

Moreover, the approach is not limited to engineering design courses. Any course in which faculty members mentor students engaged in self-directed learning sparks assignments that represent authentic information exchange and thus develop transferable rhetorical skills. Such engagement can occur at any level; for example, in 15 minutes, freshmen can analyze faculty audiences sufficiently to develop guidelines for email if they are invited to do so. Repeated exposure to this analytical practice in a range of contexts, based on the principles outlined here, helps students move from learning to produce specific products to learning an analytical practice applicable across both academic and workplace communication situations.

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Marie C. Paretti is an Assistant Professor of Engineering Education at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blanksburg, VA. She directs the Engineering Communications Program for Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) and Engineering Science and Mechanics (ESM). Her research interests include the role of communication in engineering design, student authorship in technical communication, assessment of communication skills, and activity theory and workplace engineering practices.