Assessing excellence: Using activity theory to understand assessment practices in engineering communication

In the workplace, communication serves not as an end in itself, with features that are ldquogoodrdquo or ldquobadrdquo, but as a tool for mediating a range of professional activities, and effective documents are presentations are those that achieve their goals. Yet assessment methods in technical and professional communication often continue to rely on an evaluation of features apart from the intended work of the document. In this paper, we use activity theory as a lens to explore both the criteria for effective communication and the degree to which portfolio assessment methods can be applied to effectively assess student learning in this domain.