Improving communication skills through project-based learning

Communication skills are an essential part of engineering education in order to prepare students to be competent for engineering industry. This paper described a project-based learning activity that integrated communication through lab reports to improve students' higher level engineering skills and increase their communication skills. By guiding students to answer questions about observations and results using examples and a detailed grading rubric, we were able to see a great improvement in their technical writing. We also found that practicing the lab report format for the individual labs made the final lab report easier to compile, and the students were less overwhelmed and able to understand the big picture. Additionally, having a TA available for personal questions on grading comments helped those who needed more explanation or who had questions outside the scope of the rubric and examples.