How Student Written Communication Skills Benefit During Participation in an Industry-Sponsored Civil Engineering Capstone Course

Because many engineering programs use capstone design courses and value strong communication abilities, authors sought to identify how student written communication skills changed because of industry-sponsored capstone design projects. A student exit survey was collected at the end of the capstone design course during faculty-led projects and projects led by practicing engineers in industry. These results led the researchers to subsequently evaluate two semesters of before-and-after writing samples using a rubric. Student surveys suggested a statistically significant increase in learning about professional issues, problem solving, and written/oral communication. Evaluation of student writing samples suggests that the students significantly improved their grammar/spelling and their organization of content during the course. These findings suggest that industry-sponsored projects help students recognize the relation between professionalism and correspondence that is organized and void of grammar and spelling errors.