Reflect, Review, and Revise: Using Checklists to Improve Students’ Lab Reports

We present preliminary findings from our study on how to help 2nd year Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) students enrolled in a design course improve the written quality of their reports. ECE students focus on the design aspects of their lab projects but tend to neglect the textual aspects. Hence, our motivating inquiry aimed to find a convenient, low-investment way of getting ECE students to improve the formatting, graphics, and style of their reports without the professor or TAs having to give up valuable lab or lecture time to writing instruction. The proposed solution is uniquely simple and manageable: a self-review checklist. To determine whether using a self-review checklist would prompt students to improve their writing, we compared and contrasted 27 reports produced by groups of students before they had access to a checklist with reports produced after they had access to a checklist. Although improvements in writing style appear to be minimal, early analysis shows that robust gains were made in document formatting and integration of graphics.