Focusing on writing to learn approach to increase engagement and performance in digital design lab

In an effort to help students in the discipline build on their writing skills throughout the undergraduate curriculum, Georgia Southern University initiated a quality enhancement plan (QEP) with a focus on writing across the Electrical Engineering curriculum. As part of this plan, the Digital Design Lab course, offered at the sophomore level in the curriculum, implemented several strategies to help students build on their previous writing skills, and in the process improved their technical vocabulary, the ability to communicate using it, increased students' engagement, collaboration, and performance in the course. In this work, the effect of deliberately engaging students in their writing skills as a process to learn the content material and communicate it effectively is presented. Several strategies were used like faculty instruction, using rubrics as a guide for assessment, peer reviewing and engaging a student writing fellow to assist students in this process. The effectiveness of these strategies was verified using multiple statistical assessment methods and the students' performance before and after the intervention was compared with emphasis on the writing-to-learn process. Qualitative data is also presented to assess the benefit of the intervention for students learning the course content.