Development of a Social Media Support Technology to Enhance Writing Skills Among Engineering Students

Several sources within the engineering community have identified writing as a relevant interpersonal proficiency that is necessary to thrive in a technical field. Specifically, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) has required ABET accredited colleges and universities to ensure their students have an ability to communicate effectively. The student outcome regarding communication skills should be incorporated within the curricula and coursework to ensure students' have opportunities to develop their writing skills. Likewise, representatives from industry, government, and graduate programs place strong emphasis on the need for college graduates to have strong writing skills. Although poor writing skills was a well known problem, a comprehensive and effective solution has not been identified. Pea and Kurland (1987) mentioned the need to expand cognitive writing technology capabilities beyond text production, while incorporating a space for collaboration. Therefore, the design and development of a social media inspired cognitive support technology has been explored to enhance the writing skills of engineering students using a user-centric approach. In parallel, studies have shown that the use of informal styles of writing used with communication technologies (i.e. Short Message Service (SMS) language and Social Media) is a practice that has transferred into academic settings. This study was composed of three phases aimed to address concerns regarding writing in undergraduate engineering students. A mixed methods approach was used to collect data from students and faculty members to address the research questions involving the student perspectives of writing self-efficacy, attitudes toward writing, relationships between writing self efficacy and attitudes toward writing, and the influence of electronic communication technology usage on the student's writing skills. There were low, moderate, and high levels of writing self efficacy and attitudes toward writing. The second phase used a User-Centered Design approach to increase the likelihood of a writing support tool to be adopted as a relevant application within the engineering community. Qualitative analysis was conducted and the Needs Analysis and Requirements Acquisition (NARA) framework was utilized to extract user requirements for an educational technology driven by social interactions within peer and intelligent systems. The third phase involved the development of a low-fidelity prototype based on the user-requirements constructed in Phase II. A heuristic evaluation was conducted by participants to identify problems, rate the severity of each problem identified, and rate whether the heuristic guideline was met within the entire system. A Pareto Chart was utilized to identify the heuristics and problems that should be modified. Furthermore, three out of the five evaluators System Usability Scale (SUS) Scores fell within the acceptable score of greater than or equal to 70. The overall outcome of this study was that engineering student's consider writing learnable and teachable, but they do not consider writing enjoyable. The level of writing self-efficacy varied for each student participant and the study revealed a challenge engineering professors face with teaching technical writing. Other implications emerged during the qualitative analysis such as influences of weak writing skills and a synopsis of how students and faculty members have learned technical writing. There were 34 guidelines developed in Phase II. Also, a few of the guidelines were reflected in the low-fidelity prototype of the educational technology.