Learning through writing in an engineering course

In the Fall 1982 semester, engineering report writing was integrated into the structure of a junior-level electrical engineering course at Howard University. The required homework consisted of engineering reports instead of the traditional textbook problem sets. A follow-up analysis of grades on examinations, on reports, and in later courses showed that (1) student understanding of engineering subject matter was not compromised by the course structure; (2) writing skills improved over the course of the semester; and (3) the correlation of student writing skills to problem-solving skills was approximately 0.5.