Do students benefit? Writing-to-learn in a digital design laboratory course

Communication instruction in engineering education has been formally integrated in numerous engineering programs, as industry and ABET increasingly require oral and written skills for engineering professionals. As engineering programs have adapted to these requirements, the need to understand the benefits of communication instruction to students while they are learning course content is paramount. This paper focuses on the "discipline-specific" method for teaching communication skills and addresses whether or not students learn the discipline-specific material more fully when they are required to write about that material. Data for this research comes from a sophomore-level communication- intensive digital design laboratory course. To assess retention, student answers to a specific final exam question are analyzed over three semesters. During these semesters, different writing assignments were associated with the tested subject matter. The results of this study speak directly to content-driven communication instruction and test performance.