Improving the effective communication soft skill in higher education engineering studies: an experience through written reports

Abstract

[EN] With the new paradigm of higher education, courses syllabus are not only addressed to develop the knowledge in some specific contents, but also to let the student acquire a set of the so-called transversal competences or soft skills. Amongst these, the ability of the students to communicate in an effective manner is a soft skill that will present a key role in the future careers of the students. In this paper, the experience in two courses of the Aerospace Engineering Bachelor Degree working on the effective communication through written technical reports is presented. Different enhancements have been introduced over the years, including specific sessions to present best practices for written reports, assessment using rubrics or intermediate deliveries to provide feedback to the students before they deliver the final report. The analyzed courses belong to consecutive years and are taught in both Spanish and English, which provides a wide view for understanding the impact of each feature. With the current configuration, significant improvement in the students written reports readability is obtained. Their works are more rigorous in terms of writing and format. Nevertheless, the effect of these new features on the technical content of the reports is slight. Overall, the content is transmitted by the students in a more effective manner.