How can we motivate and engage our students to develop their technical writing skills?

Paper in proceeding, 2024

Students at Chalmers University of Technology are often not as motivated nor engaged in developing their technical writing skills as they are their discipline skills and knowledge. This paper discusses the adjustments to a writing intervention aimed at addressing this issue. The students should develop how they discuss and integrate figures or tables in a text, data commentary writing. But they made minimal writing development progress and, significantly, showed little interest in doing so. Observations made during a new run of the course identified four specific teaching elements which contributed to increasing the students’ motivation and engagement in developing their writing: the use of students’ own writing for analysis and discussion, having dedicated time in class to addressing teacher feedback, including reflection tasks to help students internalize the new knowledge, and having closer collaboration between writing and technical instructors in the planning and teaching.