COMMUNICATIONS SKILLS IN SENIOR ENGINEERING STUDENTS

This paper presents the results of the first phase of the project that was developed in order to enhance oral and written communication skills in students coursing the last semester in engineering at the Capstone Design curse. At this level the student has completed both the basic training cycle (in which he had to study the subjects Competence Communicative 1 and 2) as the professional core and therefore expected, according to criterion 5 ABET, that a student is ready to finish off your formation with a design experience that includes multiple stages whose reach extends, in some cases, the implementation of solutions. During initial phase of the project was developed an advanced specific training to professors to provide them tools to understand the problems of oral and written expression within students. At this same stage an opinion poll was applied to students in order to know their impressions of the importance of communication skills in engineering and in particular, in the course Capstone Design. As well, a rubric was designed so that teachers could evaluate the communication skills in this first group. The Rubric designed allows rating on a scale of 5 points the quality of different aspects of communicative competence of students in relation to their Final Report. The Rubric was created from the enumeration of oral and written aspects that are deemed essential for proper support of a Final Report of a technology project. The project is now in the second phase, which consists in training for professors, class lectures and tutorials for students. Preliminary results presented in this report show that students are fully aware of the importance and need to develop better oral and written transferable skills in not only the Capstone Design class, but also all along their career.