Ruth Pflueger, Director, Learning Resource Center, Penn State Behrend  and Jonathan Meckley, Chair, Plastics Engineering Technology, Associate Professor of Engineering, Plastics Engineering Technology, Penn State Behrend

Writing is an essential skill for practicing engineers, but teaching writing to engineering students is quite challenging. This intervention uses undergraduate peer tutors to address this challenge. The session describes the elements of a one-hour training session for undergraduate peer writing tutors in non-technical majors who tutor engineering students on their Senior Design Projects. The training for peer tutors is co-taught by the Plastics Engineering department chair and tutor supervisor. 

Related issues that we will discuss include: engineering students’ increased understanding of the importance of writing to their future careers; securing the support of engineering faculty for the program; how improved self-efficacy among the tutors results in higher-quality feedback for the students. Benefits, among others, include improved readability of the projects, greater collaboration between students and tutors, and capitalizing on existing resources. Finally, we will discuss how this might be implemented in other disciplines.