Incorporating Generative Artificial Intelligence into Engineering Writing Courses

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

This project aims to serve the national interest by developing an engineering writing curriculum that incorporates generative artificial intelligence (AI). With support from the Engaged Student Learning track of the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Directorate for STEM Education (IUSE: EDU) program, this project is designed to improve engineering students’ writing skills and enable them to be knowledgeable and ethical users of AI. Writing and communication are crucial to engineers and new generative AI tools such as ChatGPT pose significant opportunities and challenges for helping engineering students become better writers and communicators. Thus, this project seeks to study the integration of AI writing tools in an undergraduate engineering writing course and create open-source products to help instructors integrate AI writing tools into such courses. The project seeks to maximize the digital and AI literacy of emerging engineers to foster critical writing and communication skills, both in college and in their future careers. It is imperative that engineers both understand the potential pitfalls of generative AI related to incorrect information, bias, privacy, and intellectual property rights, and learn to write well with generative AI. The knowledge to understand why and when to use generative AI in writing, the skills to write prompts that generate useful text, and the ethical use of those texts to support one’s own writing should be developed in all engineering students, regardless of socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, or gender. The project will use design-based implementation research to understand the best practices for integrating AI writing tools into an undergraduate engineering writing course and the impact such integration has on students’ development as writers. To meet these goals, researchers will iteratively develop, implement, and evaluate (a) a curriculum that can be used to integrate AI writing tools into undergraduate engineering writing and communication courses, (b) a pedagogically-informed AI writing platform to ensure reliable access to generative AI for the purposes of the curriculum, and (c) professional development to support instructor use of the curriculum and platform. Each phase of the project will be implemented following the Plan-Do-Act-Study framework: the team will collaboratively plan (set goals, compare practices, select use cases); do (make an action plan to integrate AI writing tools into the Communications in the Professional World course); act (implement the curriculum); and study (monitor and evaluate the progress, analyze findings). The Plan-Do-Act-Study will be conducted in a cyclical manner to iteratively improve the integration and products. Ultimately, the team will make the curriculum, tool, and professional development publicly available on the project website; conduct in-person and online workshops for instructors to support their adoption of the curriculum; offer quarterly webinars to a national audience; and disseminate findings in open access publications, all with the goal of informing STEM instructors across the U.S. about how to incorporate generative AI in writing instruction. The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.