Teaching Communication in Context: Rhetorical Moves in Data Science Reports

This study involves a data science and machine learning course partnered with an engineering communication course—referred to here as an authentically integrated communication model—and offers insights into such a model for engineering educators. In these partnered courses, student teams apply data science and machine learning tools to conduct data analysis and write two data science reports. Through qualitative coding and corpus analysis methods, rhetorical moves that students make in the data science report genre were identified. Twelve out of 57 total final reports were randomly chosen and coded, then six corpora of excerpts related to two codes and subcodes were created to generate keyword lists. These codes were "results," "discussion," as well as "ineffective" and "effective" subcodes for each main code. The total codes were then compared to one another according to students' enrollment in both courses. Overall, students' reports in the engineering communication class more often contained effective results and effective discussion excerpts. Keywords along with example sentences are provided to demonstrate greater context for the use of language in the data science report genre.