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This article was downloaded by: [University of Tennessee At Martin] On: 05 October 2014, At: 04:51 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Technical Communication Quarterly Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/htcq20 Integrating technical editing students into a multidisciplinary engineering project Rose Norman a & Robert A. Frederick b a Associate Professor of English , University of Alabama in Huntsville b Associate Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering , University of Alabama in Huntsville Published online: 11 Mar 2009. To cite this article: Rose Norman & Robert A. Frederick (2000) Integrating technical editing students into a multidisciplinary engineering project, Technical Communication Quarterly, 9:2, 163-189, DOI: 10.1080/10572250009364692 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10572250009364692 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and

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This article was downloaded by: [University of Tennessee At Martin]On: 05 October 2014, At: 04:51Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number:1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street,London W1T 3JH, UK

Technical CommunicationQuarterlyPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/htcq20

Integrating technicalediting students into amultidisciplinary engineeringprojectRose Norman a & Robert A. Frederick ba Associate Professor of English , University ofAlabama in Huntsvilleb Associate Professor of Mechanical andAerospace Engineering , University of Alabama inHuntsvillePublished online: 11 Mar 2009.

To cite this article: Rose Norman & Robert A. Frederick (2000) Integratingtechnical editing students into a multidisciplinary engineering project, TechnicalCommunication Quarterly, 9:2, 163-189, DOI: 10.1080/10572250009364692

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10572250009364692

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of allthe information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on ourplatform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensorsmake no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy,completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views ofthe authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis.The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should beindependently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and

Page 2: Integrating technical editing students into a multidisciplinary engineering project

Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings,demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, inrelation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

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Technical Communication Quarterly 163

Integrating Technical EditingStudents into a MultidisciplinaryEngineering Project

Rose NormanUniversity of Alabama in Huntsville

Robert A. FrederickUniversity of Alabama in Huntsville

A three-year experiment in integrating technical editing students into amultidisciplinary engineering design project developed several ways of helpingstudents apply classroom learning to practical problems. Each year, theengineering students formed Integrated Product Teams (IPTs) and thetechnical editing students provided editorial support, first as full members ofIPTs, then as separate editorial support teams. Research from cooperativelearning and teamwork indicates strategies and techniques for best integratingthe technical editing students.

The typical technical editing class incorporates a project that in-volves editors with writers and situations that create a needfor what the textbook teaches. Similarly, engineering students

need project-driven courses that teach them to apply what they havelearned to practical design problems. Since 1996, we have had theopportunity to bring technical editing students and engineeringstudents together in a project-driven engineering course that simulatesmany of the experiences that editors and engineers will face in theworkplace. The engineering class is a one-semester (14 weeks),undergraduate Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Senior DesignProject course taught each spring by Dr. Robert Frederick. Theengineering students divide into Integrated Product Teams (IPTs)intended to bring together specialists from many fields to workcollaboratively on a single project. Each year, the three or fourseparate IPTs compete with each other much as small companies do,bringing in a variety of consultants and others from outside theengineering class itself. IPTs have included business graduate stu-

Spring 2000, Vol. 9, No. 2. (163-189)

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dents, electrical engineering students, and engineering students from aFrench technical school, as well as the technical communicationstudents. For clarity, we will refer to this engineering class and itsassociates as the "IFF class." This article reports how we have experi-mented over a three-year period (1996-98) with ways of involvingstudents from our university's technical communication programs asproject editors for the IFT class.

Our goal each year has been to give the editors firsthand experi-ence in copyediting technical reports, working with authors andteams, managing project work, developing computer skills, andultimately producing valuable work samples for their portfolios. Theengineering class offers ample opportunity for editors to do all of thesethings, but the project itself has proved exceptionally challenging forboth engineering students and editors. Research on teamwork andcooperative learning has been useful in analyzing the results of eachyear's project. We begin this article with a review of this research,introducing some key terms we apply later in analyzing each year'sproject. We then set the stage for the analysis by describing the IPTclass and the work that project editors have done for the IPTs duringeach year of the collaboration. Next we discuss how we integratedtechnical editing students during each year of the study using differentteam configurations:

• 1996 Hybrid Rocket Motor Project: Editors on IPTs• 1997 Crew Escape Project: Editors as an independent team• 1998 MULE Project: Independent editing teams with liaisons to

IPTs

This has been a complex project, and describing it in any detailcan be confusing, so we have provided summary tables to help sort outwhat was going on during each year (see Tables 1 and 2). Afterdiscussing each project year separately, we synthesize our findings in asection comparing results of the different approaches each year, anddiscussing workload and grading issues. We then draw conclusionsconcerning how best to integrate technical editing students in futureclasses.

Review of ResearchPublished research on collaborative projects comes from two

different realms: work on teamwork in industry and higher education(including studies of collaborative writing and editing) and work oncooperative learning in education.

Teamwork in Industry and Higher Education

The 1997 study by Rebecca E. Burnett et al. synthesizes a widevariety of work on collaboration and teamwork as it applies to techni-

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Technical Communication Quarterly 165

cal communication. In the technical communication literature,studies of teamwork mostly focus on collaborative writing in technicalwriting classes (e.g., Deming; Shirk, "Fallacies"), and on technicalcommunication teams (Bosley, "Designing") and the importance oflinks to industry (e.g., Bosley, "Collaborative"). Some more generalwork has been done on the importance of collaboration in technicalcommunication (Debs), and some collections of essays on collabora-tive writing have been useful for background context in the field (Layand Karis; Ede and Lunsford; Forman).

Publications about editing projects focus on teaming editingstudents with a single writer (Samson) or studies of editing relation-ships (e.g., Shirk, "Collaborative"). The present configuration oftechnical editing students working with a team of engineering studentsmost resembles the long-term projects studied by Burnett and byTiffany M. Beheler and Jill Malar. Burnett describes a failed collabo-ration in a problem-solving student engineering group setup similar tothe IPT concept. In her study, the single technical writer (a graduatetechnical communication student) rescued a dysfunctional technicalteam by focusing them on their reporting needs. Beheler and Malardescribe student engineering teams that have assigned writers andeditors to a long-term project. They report problems with lack ofrespect for writers, lack of initiative from writers, and different atti-tudes toward group management by teachers. Both studies relatecollaborative projects to the need for a new corporate model thatfavors teamwork.

One of the most useful books about teamwork in industry is J.Richard Hackman's Groups That Work (And Those That Don't), whichprovides 27 case studies of a variety of teams, classified in sevencategories. While they do not include IPTs among the teams studied,the team classification that best fits what the engineering and techni-cal editing students did in our study is the task force. Hackman'smatrix for evaluating any team's effectiveness proved useful for study-ing the editing teams formed during the third year of our project.Hackman links success or failure of teams to three "enabling condi-tions": effort, talent, and strategy.

Cooperative LearningResearch on cooperative or collaborative learning has only

recently moved from studies of elementary and secondary education(notably work by David W. Johnson and Roger T. Johnson, ShlomoSharan, Yael Sharan and Shlomo Sharan, Robert E. Slavin, andSpencer Kagan) to applications to higher education. In general, thesestudies focus on "learning groups" designed to replace lectures withactive learning (see Bouton and Garth; MacGregor; Thorley andGregory). In the 1990s there has been a burst of research applyingthese principles to higher education, including a professional journaldevoted to die subject, Cooperative Learning and College Teaching, and

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166 TCQ: Norman and Frederick

several papers describing cooperative learning in technical courses(e.g., Saylor; Felder and Brent; Gallowich; Hart and Groccia;Mourtos). None of the research describes a course quite like the IPTclass, although Martyn Pressnell's description of an aerospace engi-neering class using teams superficially resembles it. Barbara J. Millisand Philip G. Cottell's 1997 book synthesizes research since the early1990s and provides details on how to structure activities for classroomteams in order to foster "deep learning" (37).

For purposes of our study, concepts developed and tested byJohnson and Johnson, key researchers in K-12, have been particularlyuseful. Johnson and Johnson apply their theory and principles tohigher education in a 1991 monograph written with an engineeringprofessor. This book, Cooperative Learning: Increasing College FacultyInstructional Productivity, effectively surveys the research (chiefly insocial psychology) about various aspects of group performance such as"free riders" (non-performers in groups). Their synthesis of theresearch makes this an essential starting place for those interested incooperation versus competition, and in key strategies for effectivecooperative learning. In our study, we apply Johnson and Johnson'sfive essential components for small-group learning:

• Positive interdependence: the group sinks or swims together• Promotive interaction: face to face promoting of each other's

learning• Accountability: holding each other individually accountable for

tasks• Interpersonal skills: appropriate skills in relating to each other• Group processing: frequently discussing how well the group is

working

Integrated Product Teams (IPTs) and theEngineering Design Course

The Integrated Product Team (IPT) concept is an industryapproach to handling complex projects, designed to speed up projectdevelopment activities by doing away with the serial process of passingmaterial from expert to expert (see, e.g., Khuri and Plevyak). UsingIPTs in a capstone engineering course is part of a trend to makeengineering education more responsive to industry needs (see "RealWorld 101"; Black). Engineering professor Robert Frederick hadalready used a team approach to the design class for two years beforeinvolving English professor Rose Norman and her technical communi-cation students.

The first year that we brought in technical communicationstudents as project editors, we established a basic plan for the class thathas held constant over the three years studied (Frederick et al., "Multi-

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Technical Communication Quarterly 167

Agency"; Frederick et al., "Multi-College"). For several months beforethe class begins, the engineering professor lines up a customer, fund-ing, and facilities, and attempts to identify engineering student teamleaders to involve in planning. Then on the first day of class, theengineering students form IPTs, with each team member assigned adisciplinary specialty, for example, Systems Analysis (the team leader),Propulsion, Avionics, and such. The overall project is planned inthree phases, each culminating in a report and presentation: Phase I, abaseline study; Phase II, an alternative designs review; and Phase III, afinal design study. Phase I is cooperative, with all teams collaboratingas a "superteam" to produce a baseline design. During the baselinephase, students from each IPT form small discipline teams (3-4students) to research their assigned specialty. For example, thePropulsion students from each IPT join forces to develop their exper-tise, share information, and then integrate it into a baseline designthat meets the customer's specifications. At the end of Phase I, oneIPT is selected by lot to give a slide presentation about the baselinedesign.

Phases II and III shift from cooperation among all teams to compe-tition between teams, with the IPTs simulating companies competingfor the same contract. During Phase II, each IPT researches fourdesigns developed from the baseline, and presents them in a postersession, documented in an Alternative Designs Report. Each year, wehave made these poster sessions a celebratory milestone, invitingfriends, family, and university administrators to an Open House withrefreshments and exhibits. After the social, external review teamswalk through each IPTs private team room to hear the poster presen-tation about the four designs studied. Since these presentations arecompetitive and therefore sensitive, we have established elaboratemeasures for maintaining secrecy. In Phase III, each IPT refines thepreferred concept from among the alternative designs and develops afinal report and slide presentation. Once again, external reviewersrecruited from local engineering companies, including the customerfor that year's project, form the audience for the presentations. EachIPT presents privately, as they would for a proposal bid, and then thereviewers (not the engineering professor) choose the winning concept.This approach allows the professor to take on the role of coach foreach IPT, including elaborate dry runs the week before each majorpresentation. Rewards for the winning team each year have includeda trip to present a professional paper about the project.

Overall, the IPT projects are considerably more complex andchallenging than anything reported in the cooperative learningliterature. The general plan of problem solving in groups, within astructure designed by the teacher, resembles "group investigation," acooperative learning technique designed by Sharan and Sharan.Beginning with discipline teams who report back to their IPTs re-sembles the Jigsaw cooperative learning method, although the goal is

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168 TCQ: Norman and Frederick

to become an expert in a discipline so as to apply it to the project,rather than to teach information to other IPT members as in Jigsaw(see Millis and Cottell 126-32). More than any of these classroomsituations, however, the IPT projects resemble a real-world proposal-writing setting, driven by short deadlines and high stakes. For ex-ample, the teams have only three weeks to produce a baseline design,and a team that fails to meet a reporting deadline may receive a zerofor 30% of the project grade.

This would be a recipe for failure but for an effective system ofinternal and external monitors, and the participation of "processmentors" to guide the engineering students. The three reportingperiods provide external monitors for evaluating progress and correct-ing problems. Weekly IPT meetings and team reviews provide inter-nal monitors to facilitate communication and give frequent feedbackon performance. As many scholars have noted, simply putting stu-dents in groups and telling them to work together does not constitutecooperative learning. Burnett, for example, cites inexperience incollaborative processes and lack of coaching as contributing to thefailure of the team she studied (137-38). People need to be taughthow to work effectively in teams, and this is a primary objective of theIPT class. To facilitate this learning objective, The Boeing Corpora-tion has participated each year by providing experienced engineerswho volunteer their time as process mentors to meet weekly with theengineering students and coach them on how to accomplish tasksthrough group work. As in any human endeavor, some IPTs performbetter than others, and despite all our efforts, some have come veryclose to failure, but in the three years of this study, all of the IPTs havecompleted the project respectably.

Editors and Projects for the IPT ClassThe engineering class draws on a much larger pool of students

than the technical editing class, which is part of a small technicalcommunication program within the English and communication artsdepartments. Each year, we have directly linked the undergraduatetechnical editing class to the IPT class because the editorial projectsthe IPT class provides support the main objectives of technical edit-ing: to develop copyediting skills on technical documents written byothers; to develop skills in author-editor relations and teamwork; andto develop computer skills. When possible, we have also recruitedgraduate students or undergraduates who have already completed thetechnical editing class. All of these students have completed at leastone advanced technical writing course and are juniors, seniors, orgraduate students. Because technical communication is chiefly aminor at UAH, these students have had a variety of majors, but thelarge majority were either English or Communication Arts majors.

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Technical Communication Quarterly 169

The three major editorial projects set up during the first year ofthe collaboration have remained constant during the three years of theexperiment, with increasing emphasis on publishing these projects onthe class Web site. Each year, editors have copyedited IPT technicalreports, developed a comprehensive house style guide for use incopyediting, and produced a class re'sume' booklet.

Copyediting IPT Technical Reports

The engineering students produce three graded technical reportsfor the IPT class: the baseline report and slides, alternative designsreview and poster session, and final concept report and slides. Weassign editing of these reports among project editors in various ways.Each year we have divided the baseline report among all of the projecteditors to use as practice in copyediting and in preparing project-specific materials for the style guide (see below). Since the baselinereport is compiled from discipline team reports written to a commonoutline, it divides easily, and provides good practice in editing forconsistency. For subsequent reports, each IPTs entire report isassigned to a single editor, or (in year 3) to a team of editors. As willbe discussed later, the timing and length of these reports has creatededitorial problems we have attempted to solve over the years.

Developing a Project Style GuideIPTs must produce reports that look like they belong together, a

requirement they can meet only by applying a style guide. In 1996, asingle editing student created a house style guide using the GovernmentPrinting Office Style Manual as a reference standard. In 1997, twostudents created a new guide, using the Chicago Manual of Style as thereference standard, and in 1998, a team of students adapted that guideto the new project. In 1997 and 1998, the editors also learned how tocreate MS Word templates to make it easier for the engineers to followstandard page format features (margins, typeface and size, treatment ofheadings, etc.). Each year, one editing student (or an editing teamleader) has been in charge of creating and maintaining the guide, butall of the project editors participate by compiling document stylesheets for each report or section they copyedit, thus contributing tolists of acronyms, abbreviations, special words and spellings, etc.

Producing a Class Resume BookletAs a capstone engineering course, the IPT class is a stepping stone

to job placement for these students and so all the engineering studentsmust turn in a re'sume' suitable for posting on the class Web site. Theproject editors' job has been to provide specifications for these r&um&and copyedit them for mechanical errors and consistency. In 1996

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and 1997, one editor single-handedly produced a class re'sume' bookletfor distribution at the midterm Open House. In 1997, editors werealso responsible for publishing these r&um& on the class Web site,and in 1998 we published only the Web versions, not a hardcopy ir&ume' booklet. Although one editor (or editing team) has been incharge of the re'sume' project, all of the project editors have helpedcopyedit resume's (including their own resumed).

Publishing Materials on the WebWe have been fortunate in securing volunteer labor to support

Web publishing for the class, leading to increasingly sophisticatedWeb sites (URLs are given in Table 1). In 1996, one of the editingstudents, a Web hobbyist, developed a rudimentary Web site in hisspare time. In 1997 and 1998, a senior research engineer volunteeredtime to produce and maintain an elaborate Web site for the IPT class,assisted each year by a student earning course credit solely for Webwork. With this kind of support, editing students with little or noHTML experience have been able to develop these skills by workingon resume's, and then see these published on a very sophisticated Web

Table 1

Collaborative Engineering Project Teams, 1996-1998

Year/Project/URL

1996Hybrid Rocket Motorwww.eb-p5.eb.uah.edu/rocket/

1997Crew Escape Contestsmaplab.ri.uah.edu/iptclass/

1998MULEwww.eb.uah.edu/ipt/

#0fIPTs

4

3

3

EngineeringStudents

(MAE & EE)UG' G

33 3(22M11F) (M)

25 0(22M3F)

36 1(26M10F) (M)

TechnicalEditing

Students*UG G

4c 2

(2M2F) (F)

4C 0(1M3F)

11 3(4M7F) (F)

OtherCollege

Students"UG G

0 14(9M5F)Finance

1 0

(F)

5 0(4M1F)

ESTACA

UG - Undergraduate; G - Graduate; M - Male; F - Female.Does not include 1997 and 1998 student Web masters who were technicallymembers of the editing team.High school students also participated in 1997 and 1998, but are not detailedhere because they were not team members.One student dropped out near midterm.

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Technical Communication Quarterly 171

site. In 1997, one of the editing students already had sufficient HTMLskills to develop a very professional online style guide that we havecloned for use in subsequent years. In 1997 and 1998, we also main-tained a separate Editorial Support Team (EST) Web site, whereeditors could share files, practice Web posting with ftp software, andgenerally play with writing for the Web before sending their work offfor others to post on the more public class Web site. The 1998 ESTsite may be viewed at <http://mortonweb.uah.edu/est/>.

Approaches to Integrating EditorsIn this section, we discuss how we have experimented with

integrating editors into the IPT class, from assigning editors to IPTs in1996, to forming a small, independent editorial support team (EST) in1997, to forming three small ESTs with liaisons to IPTs in 1998. Fromthe beginning, the editing teams involved a combination of traditionalclass work and group-oriented project work. Table 2 shows the variousways editing teams have been formed from various classes. Studentstaking the technical editing class met for a traditional class one day aweek, and then met for project work on the other regular class day.Other editors signed up just for the project met only for teamwork.Editing teams also met on their own time to work on projects andsometimes met with the IPT class, especially for major events, such asthe oral presentations at the end of each phase. Each year we sched-uled the technical editing class to coincide with the IPT class time tofacilitate joint meetings, and each year this has been an evening class,5:30-7:00 p.m. Because this project simulates a work environment,the engineering professor has acquired facilities each year that allowIPTs 24-hour access to team rooms and project computers. Since1997, editing students have had their own small computer lab withWeb authoring and ftp software, and less competition for computersthan in the IPT computer lab.

1996 Hybrid Rocket Motor Project: Editors on IPTsIn spring 1996, NASA sponsored an engineering project to design

a hybrid rocket motor. In this first year, we were able to form anediting team consisting of four students doing the project as an inde-pendent study (two graduate students and two advanced undergradu-ates) and two undergraduates in technical editing who made this theirclass editing project. This team of six editors met at least once a week,sometimes with the IPT class and sometimes on their own. That yearthere were four engineering IPTs (see Table 1), so we assigned each ofthe four undergraduates as an editor for a particular IPT. Each IPThad nine engineering students (including one graduate engineering

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Table 2

Editing Team Configurations, 1996-1998

4to

Year/Project

1996HybridRocketMotor

1997CrewEscapeContest

1998MULE

Relation to # of EditingIPTs Students

Each under- 6' •graduate (UG)editor assignedto an IPT as afull member

Editors totally 4 * •independent ofIPTs

Editing teams 14" •send a liaison toIPTs

Editing TeamOrganization

4 UGs assigned IPTs:2 taking Technical Editing2 taking project asindependent study

2 graduates (G) studyprocess and fill in for UGs

4 UGs taking TechnicalEditing constitute EST

11 UGs taking TechnicalEditing form 3 ESTs

3 Gs lead editing teams

Meetings

IPTs meet weekly

Full editing team meetsweekly with instructor toreport progress

Technical Editing classmeets weekly

EST meets weekly towork on project

Technical Editing classmeets weekly

ESTs meet weekly withinstructor; independentlywith team leaders

Technical Editing classmeets weekly

Grading

50%: IPT group grade20%: Participation

(IPT leader's evaluation ofindividual performance)

30%: Individual Products(instructor's evaluation of workproduced)

33%: Project leader grade for quality ofdeliverables for assigned project

33%: Quality and amount of contribu-tions to other team projects

33%: Evaluation by team membersNo group grades

For UGs:33%: Quality and amount of individual

contributions to assigned EST33%: Quality and amount of individual

contributions to other ESTs33%: Evaluation by team leader and

team membersNo group grades

G team leader grades based on writtenreports

•3p2o3w3

B>Q.

-nSo.o-̂

ick

One student dropped out near midterm in 1996 and 1997.Not shown here are the undergraduates who served as student Web masters in 1997 and 1998. They were technically EST members,but did not really perform as team members.

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Technical Communication Quarterly 173

student on each of three teams), three to four graduate finance stu-dents doing cost analyses, and one editor. The graduate students onthe editing team were to assist as mentors to undergraduates and doresearch on various aspects of the project. When one editor droppedout, one of the graduate students took his place on an IPT. The othergraduate student later pitched in to help a team whose editor wasfloundering. The project proved exceptionally challenging for botheditors and engineers, particularly with respect to demands on time. Itwas not unusual for students to spend twenty or more hours a week atthe project office. At the end, students wanted a t-shirt saying HybridRocket Project Survivor.

The student editors' experiences as full members of the IPTsvaried widely. When the four IPT leaders (engineering students)ranked the entire class of 50 on a performance scale, one editingstudent ranked in the top 3, while another ranked in the bottom 3. Ayear later, we interviewed the outstanding editor, Brooke Burns, to gether perspective on succeeding in the project. She said that the keything she learned was the importance of just "being there." (A videoof Brooke Burns' advice to students participating in the IPT class maybe viewed at <http://www.eb.uah.edu/ipt/visitors/index.html>.) TheIPTs met for class twice a week and then had regular out-of-classmeetings. Predictably, engineering students assumed an editorwouldn't be much use to them until the last minute and so didn'tencourage their editors to attend meetings and often didn't evennotify the editors of unscheduled meetings. Brooke ignored thisattitude and just made a point of frequently being at the project office.This was particularly critical in the first six weeks, when the teammembers were bonding and discovering each others' strengths andweaknesses. Soon everyone on the team knew Brooke, had learnedthat she was an expert at MS Word and several other software prod-ucts they were using, and began to rely on her for the myriad of thingsthat come up in a collaborative project.

The least successful editor had good interpersonal skills (one ofJohnson and Johnson's requirements for effective group performance)and was a solid "B" student, but time conflicts prevented her fromattending many of the meetings, and sometimes she missed or was latefor regular classes. In the "sink or swim" mode of the project, shequickly sank. At the first important deadline for which a reportneeded to be edited, she was given less than 24 hours to do the job,and did it poorly. From then on, she had no credibility on the team,and her IPT leader actually wanted her off the team. We resolved thesituation by assigning one of the graduate students to help that team.

"Sink or swim" has been the mode of the IPTs each year, andpositively so. In fact, Johnson et al. describe the first essential require-ment for effective group performance using exactly that phrase. Theirtechnical term for this requirement is "positive interdependence," thesituation in which team members recognize that they sink or swimtogether. The IPT also met Johnson and Johnson's requirement of

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"individual accountability," perhaps too much so, since a single editorwas held wholly accountable for copyediting a very long report in ashort time—not unusual in the workplace, but never desirable. Twoother requirements Johnson et al. cite for effective group performance,however, were not met in the 1996 project, at least not in the IPTwith the editing student who performed poorly. These are "promotiveinteraction" and "group processing."

Promotive interaction involves "individuals encouraging andfacilitating each other's efforts to achieve, complete tasks, and produceto reach the group's goals" (Johnson et al. 18). The research Johnsonet at. did showed that promotive interaction, combined with positiveinterdependence, has the most powerful effect on group achievement.People need to be taught how to encourage each other if it doesn'tcome naturally to them. The low-performing editor did not receivemuch encouragement from her IPT team leader, who did not knowhow to involve an editor in meeting the team's goals. This lack ofunderstanding was related to the editors being isolated by their func-tion on the IPT, an isolation the other editors overcame in variousways, most notably by simply being at meetings and pitching inwherever needed. One problem with the non-performing editor waspoor attendance, but it soon grew into what was perceived as a person-ality conflict between the editor and her team leader. The Englishteacher attempted to mediate, and to sort out some miscommunica-tion between the two, but it was really too late to repair the damage.Bringing in one of the graduate students at the end rescued thesituation somewhat, at least insofar as providing skilled editing of thefinal report, and in fact that IPT went on to win the competitionamong the four IPTs. The team's ultimate success probably had less todo with the contribution of the editors than with the fact that itsproposal was the most innovative rocket motor design.

Winning a competition, however, is far from the major educa-tional goal of having students work together in IPTs. We do it so thatthey can learn how to work well as a team, and learn more effectivelythan they would have individually in a traditional class. Ann HillDuin summarizes some of the topics any project team should discuss inorder to promote satisfaction and productivity. These include vari-ables such as the amount of control individuals have over the finalproduct, agreed-upon procedures for resolving disputes, and individualmembers' attitudes towards writing and the writing process. Groupprocessing of this kind might have improved communication andhelped make the team editor more productive. Reflecting on (process-ing) how the group is functioning is essential in order to identify whatis working and what needs to change: "students do not learn fromexperiences they do not reflect on" (Johnson et al. 69). Groups willdo this to some degree without prompting, but group processing ismore effective if it is structured and systematic. That is, groups needto make time weekly to discuss the group's specific strengths andweaknesses, and then combine this with promotive interaction toboost team performance. The IPTs did, of course, meet frequently,

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and the Boeing process mentors assigned to help them did encouragethem to discuss what was going well, what they could do better. But,at least in this one IPT, the group processing failed to include theeditor as part of what was or was not going well, and hence the leaderdid not act to correct deficiencies in time.

1997 Crew Escape Project: Editors as an IndependentTeam

The 1997 engineering design project, sponsored by the UAHSpace Grant Consortium, asked the engineering students to hold acontest in which a remote-controlled glider would drop an egg from aspecified height onto a target without breaking the egg. The eggsimulated the crew that might be escaping from an aircraft, hence theofficial name "Crew Escape Contest." The engineering students weredivided into three IPTs of eight to ten students each. In this year, nobusiness students or graduate students were involved in the IPT class.

With a class of only four undergraduate editing students (reducedto three when one student dropped out of school near midterm), andno graduate technical communication students involved, we sought toprotect the editing students from the rigors of full IPT membership byforming a separate editing team. Each editor took the lead on oneproject assignment and was backup for a second project assignment.An engineering student who had worked on the Hybrid Rocket MotorProject was assigned to the editing team as student Web master to aidin putting class materials online.

As in all three years, rapid change and seat-of-the-pants perfor-mance was the rule, which made it a particularly intense experiencefor the one small team of editors. Removing the editors from full IPTmembership avoided some of the problems of the Hybrid RocketMotor Project, but led to difficulties with integrating editors into theproject. In fact, this editing team had the least involvement with theIPTs of any during the three years of the study. The editors metMonday nights for class work and Tuesday nights for project work, butonly met with the IPTs on six Tuesday nights: the opening class, twodry runs for presentations, and the three major presentations at theend of each project phase. The editors were well aware of the IPTobjectives, they attended presentations and they edited IPT reports,but they had very little interaction with the IPT students, and eventhe IPT team leaders were unclear about the relation of the editingteam to the ongoing project. The lesson here seems to be that if theproject does not place authors and editors in frequent, close proximityor require them to interact, they won't initiate it on their own. Ulti-mately, this group of students was never integrated into the IPTproject.

In part, this lack of integration may be explained by examiningthe group's function as a team. While we called them a "team," therewas actually little difference between this group of editors and any

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small class, since their English teacher was the de facto team leader,and there was no shared reward system either among the technicalediting students or between the technical editing students and theengineering students. Whereas in 1996, each team member's gradewas linked in part to the IPT grade (see Table 2), in 1997 we gradededitors chiefly on what they produced. We attempted to promotepositive interdependence by pairing off editing students doing relatedprojects: the two students in charge of the style guide (hardcopy andonline versions) and the two students in charge of the re"sum&(hardcopy and online versions) were supposed to back each other up.The nature of their projects should have provided that interdepen-dence: the style pair needed to create a project-specific guide andmake sure the online and hardcopy versions matched; the same wastrue for the resume" team. In practice, the pairs never bonded butinstead students worked independently, offering to help each other,but seldom really doing so. There was so little out-of-class interactionthat the student assigned to the hardcopy style guide had dropped outof school before anyone realized there was a problem.

This team was working chiefly according to what Hackman callsthe hub-and-spokes model, with the team leader (teacher) making allthe major decisions and the students mainly choosing which pre-defined task to tackle. This approach was intended to give the stu-dents a head start on the project and ensure their success in accom-plishing complex tasks. The hub-and-spokes model worked to theextent that three of the four students assigned specific tasks were ableto accomplish them on time and in good order. But there was nocomponent requiring interaction with the IPTs beyond attendingmeetings and editing reports. The editors thus functioned more asobservers and critics of the project than as participants.

Still, with the assistance of the engineering student assigned to theediting team as Web master, this EST produced a well-designed Website, including an exceptionally good online style guide that wascloned for use the following year. The Web component added animportant dimension to the project. Where in 1996 it was a "frill" oradd-on involving only one editor, by 1997 the Web had becomecentral to the project, and gave the editing students a sense of pride inwhat they had produced, beyond the fairly ephemeral level ofcopyedited reports.

1998 MULE Project: Independent Editing Teams withLiaisons to IPTs

The size of the technical editing class in 1998 made it possible toform three separate undergraduate Editorial Support Teams (ESTs): astyle guide team, a re'sume' team, and an editorial review team (seeTable 2). We recruited experienced graduate students in technical

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communication as editing team leaders, one of whom had worked onthe Crew Escape Project the previous spring. The undergraduateswere allowed to choose which EST they worked on, and we allocatedclass time for forming teams and for brief team meetings. Rather thanhaving editors serve as full members of IPTs, we asked each EST toassign liaisons to the three IPTs.

The U.S. Army AMCOM Directorate at Redstone Arsenalfunded the 1998 engineering project to prepare conceptual designs ofa Modular Unmanned Logistics Express (MULE) vehicle to operate inthe year 2020. The requirements were for a pilotless vertical take-offcargo aircraft. This year, in order to experiment with videoconferencing, the project also brought in student participants fromESTACA, an engineering college in Paris, France, and from LindenHigh School, a small, rural Alabama high school several hours distantfrom our university.

The size of the technical editing class resolved many of theproblems experienced in 1996 and 1997 and provided much greateropportunity for effectively integrating the editors with the engineeringstudents. There were enough students to balance the workload, andto form real teams with peers (albeit graduate students) as teamleaders. Initially, this arrangement seemed the best of the threeattempted, and it certainly provided the most editorial expertise, but itdid not appear to significantly diminish the perceived projectworkload. In fact, the graduate student team leader who had partici-pated the previous year reported that leading the resume" team in 1998was more work for her than doing the entire online style guide in1997. Probably this greater time demand is because having one smallteam, with each member assigned a major task (as in 1997) ends upmore like individual work than teamwork, and helping a team accom-plish a task is very different from doing the job alone.

The opportunity to form separate ESTs for each major editingcontribution to the IPT project did create a better teamwork environ-ment for the technical editing students. Reporting to a graduatestudent team leader worked much better than having students reportonly to a teacher. Yet the three ESTs were not equally successful,despite the fact that all three had outstanding team leaders and asufficient number of team members. Hackman's criteria for judginggroup effectiveness are useful in examining each of these teams. Tosupplement our own observations, we also interviewed EST teamleaders several months after the project ended to get their perspectiveon how their teams performed.

Hackman describes three "enabling conditions" (9-10), which wehave linked below to some of Johnson et al.'s essentials for success inlearning groups:

1) Effort - the group must work hard enough to accomplish its tasks.Hackman links this to "group structures that promote compe-

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tent work" (10). In the language of Johnson et al., thesestructures would be called positive interdependence, promotiveinteraction, and personal accountability and responsibility.

2) Talent - the team members must already have the necessaryknowledge and skills to accomplish its tasks, or access tonecessary training and organizational support. For purposes ofthis project, this relates to the editing and HTML skills thetechnical editing class teaches, as well as the writing andcomputer skills the students bring with them.

3) Strategy - the group must apply performance strategies appropri-ate to the task at hand, supported by coaching in group processand in performing interdependently. Here we would applyfrom Johnson et al. the need to teach interpersonal skills andto practice group processing to reflect on how the group isperforming.

With the possible exception of strategy, we thought we had set upthe ESTs properly to promote effort and provide needed talent, yet theperformance of some of the ESTs showed weakness in each of theseareas, partly as a result of the tasks assigned, partly as a result of thecomposition of the teams. Simplifying somewhat, we might say thatthe Review EST had an effort problem and the Resume" EST had atalent problem.

The Review team leader reported that her team members haddifficulty taking personal responsibility and meeting deadlines. Sheattributed this difficulty to the fact that much of the group work wasungraded, commenting that "continual feedback on performance—and assigning a grade to it—would be the only way" to create anenvironment in which those students would perform well. She writes,"I tried to stress the importance of the work over the grade, but theydidn't care. If it wasn't graded and weighted like the tests, it didn'tmatter." Ultimately, of course, individual work was graded, but not ateach intermediate deadline. The team leader's assessment would arguefor creating positive reward interdependence (Mensch et al.) throughsetting up a more elaborate grading scheme, perhaps including a groupgrade (grading is discussed in a separate section).

The Review team also had more trouble grasping its task than theother teams did. They were assigned to coordinate the copyediting ofIPT reports, including preparing writer's aids before and after thereport deadlines. They spent a lot of time figuring out what "writer'saids" were and sometimes went off on tangents, such as producing alengthy handout on passive voice. The team did eventually catch on,and their leader was sufficiently intrigued by the research her team didon writing aids that she and one of her team members subsequentlydid an independent study to upgrade the University Writing CenterWeb site (<http://www.uah.edu/writing/>).

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The problem that the Re'sume' team leader reported might bedescribed as a talent problem, combined with a logistics problem. Theleader spent a lot of time training her students in computer skills andresolving complicated work and family schedules. Collecting the 37engineering student r&ume's on disk turned out to be the easiest part.It made her team's job harder that we used these resume's to let thewhole class practice converting to HTML and editing to a standard.Ultimately, her team was responsible for final HTML edits and formaking these resume's accessible through various Web front pages.That meant her team's job was more Web intensive than any otherteam's, yet she had students who initially did not understand Win-dows, let alone ftp or HTML. Interviewed a year later, she com-mented that because of the students' very different skill levels, "Irepeated myself a lot, did a lot of hands-on work and phone counsel-ing, and hoped that eventually something would sink in." She waswilling to spend the extra time because she wanted to help her editorsdevelop their computer skills, but it proved a very frustrating experi-ence for her because not enough class time was set aside for thetraining her team members needed. Moreover, once the Re'sume' teamleader had met with the IPTs to discuss the resume's and collectedelectronic copies, the Re"sum£ team lost touch even with the IPT towhich they were supposed to be sending a liaison. The leader reportedthat she was happy if she managed to get all of her team memberstogether to meet with each other, much less to make sure that some-one would reliably meet with the assigned IPT.

The Style team functioned best in all categories, and that teamleader reported the best experience of the three. All but one of herfour team members had good computer skills, and they were workingwith an already well-developed online style guide that just needed tobe tailored to the current project. That team was able to meet regu-larly, all team members were reliable, and most had the talent andinterpersonal skills to perform well as a team. Even though their teamhad the best link to an IPT (an editor who attended every singlemeeting of one IPT), the team leader reported that her team didn'tfeel very attached to the engineering project itself. Their team leaderfelt they would have benefited from a midterm evaluation, moreformal group processing, and more communication between theeditors and the engineers and between the editing groups themselves.

The Style team's experience points to the main area that needsmost attention in future classes, teaching interpersonal skills andgroup processing. The main structure set up for promoting groupprocessing was a requirement that all ESTs turn in a weekly memosummarizing what they had accomplished and what was left to do,with detailed lists of tasks performed that week by each team member.Yet this structural requirement worked differently for each team. TheStyle team leader wrote the weekly status report for her group, using itas a means of keeping the group focused on its tasks. The other two

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groups passed around the job of writing the weekly status report, withthe result that the report sometimes didn't get done. It might haveworked better to assign the status report every two weeks and make it acollaborative effort, part of a face-to-face group processing activity.

Comparison of ApproachesAll three approaches to integrating editors into the IPT class have

advantages and disadvantages, as shown in Table 3. This sectionsynthesizes our findings over the three years we have experimentedwith using project editors in the IPT class. We discuss the variousways of deploying the editors; the differences observed with changes inteam size, composition, and workload; and issues of grading andrewarding editors.

Table 3

Analysis of Different Editing Team Configurations, 1996-1998

Editing TeamConfiguration

Editors FullIPT members

OneIndependentEditing Team

Three EditingTeams withLiaisonsto IPTs

Advantages

• Promotes positive interde-pendence (if goals orrewards are shared)

• Fosters trust throughproximity

• Buffers editors from rigorsof full IPT membership(e.g., frequent meetings,frustrating technicalproblems)

• Gives editors a sense ofpower and control over theirwork

• Allows editors to focus onprojects that benefit all theIPTs, e.g., house style guide

• Provides support for editors(through their editing team)while also establishing apresence on the IPT

• Provides enough people todivide the editing workequitably

Disadvantages

• Isolates editor fromother editors

• Potentially crushing toinexperienced editorswhen only one editor/IPT

• Isolates editors fromIPTs, reducing theircredibility

• Creates perception ofeditors as "gatekeepers"and "grammar police"

• Reduces sense ofteamwork; more like asmall class than a trueteam, especially ifteacher is team leader

• Requires extra effort toparticipate in twoseparate teams (the IPTand the EST)

• Presents logisticalproblems in maintainingpresence on theassigned IPTs

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Deploying the EditorsEditors in the workplace are typically assigned either to a product

group within a department or to a position (or editing group, such asTechnical Publications) outside of the product group or department.While there are advantages to each of these arrangements, receivedopinion suggests that the greatest advantages are to be gained fromsituations where writers and editors work closely as part of a singleprocess, rather than in separate departments. Thus, having editorsparticipate as full members of the IPTs seemed the ideal way tointegrate them into the engineering project. Moreover, one of thepedagogical goals of the class project was to help editors learn to workwith authors, and vice versa. We believed that placing editors onIPTs would facilitate that goal and avoid the adversarial relationshipsthat can arise when editors are in a separate organization. The resultswhen editors were full IPT members (Year 1) were so mixed, however,that we have continued to modify the way editing students are de-ployed on the project. Forming a separate editing team in Year 2simulated the separate "Tech Pubs" typical in many engineeringcompanies, but was the least successful in meeting the goal of develop-ing good editor-author relations. In Year 3, we had enough students totry a compromise approach, three separate editing teams with liaisonsto IPTs. This configuration can potentially marshal the power of bothseparate editing teams and editors on IPTs. With some tinkering,described below, the compromise approach seems to be the best way tobalance the demands of the project with the learning curve requiredfor the editing students.

Editors on IPTs

The initial method of deploying editing students as full membersof IPTs is in the spirit of what IPTs are all about (combining variousdisciplines or resources) and seems to follow the advice of scholarswho have studied teamwork. The level of effort required of IPTmembers in these engineering projects, however, puts a very highdemand on the editors, who already have the disadvantage of being aminority on a team of engineers.

One reason that assigning editors to IPTs proved exceptionallydemanding was that it is the nature of an open-ended design projectthat students must find their own way, i.e., take the client's designspecifications and a set of deadlines and make sense out of a complexproject. This can be overwhelming to the engineering students, whoare struggling to figure out the technical aspects of the problem and tobest use their team members. As so often occurs in the workplace, thisscenario challenges editors to prove their value to the team. TheHybrid Rocket Motor Project itself was also exceptionally challenging.Although these were primarily mechanical and aerospace engineeringstudents, most of them had no previous experience designing rocketmotors, so their learning curve was steep. This made them rather

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intolerant of the fact that the editing students were also learning onthe job.

Our conclusion was that one editor per IPT was too few, and thatthe IPTs really needed experienced editors, not students just learning.The demands of IPT membership so closely simulate real-worldexperience that, at the least, the editors needed partners for moralsupport and to learn from and with. It was not until Year 3 that wehad enough technical editing students to take a step in that directionby forming editing teams led by graduate students.

Editors on Separate Editing Teams

In the editorial support teams formed in subsequent years, wehoped to buffer the editors from the day-to-day frustrations the engi-neers face, while giving the editors a sense of power and control overtheir own assigned tasks. In practice, this approach was more success-ful in aiding editors in completing the style guide and re'sume' projectsfor the IPTs than in promoting editor-author relations in copyeditingthe IPT reports.

The main problem the first time we tried editorial teams was thatthe IPTs at first ignored the editors, and then came to see them asadversaries in the editorial reviews. In Year 1 we had learned thattight IPT project deadlines made it difficult to schedule reasonableeditorial review of draft reports. The engineers tended to have toolittle written by the draft or dry-run deadline, and then they didn'twant to let go of the draft as their grading deadline approached. InYear 2 we resolved this by placing the editorial review after thegrading deadline. The review system took about a week, and there waspressure to provide results in time for the engineering instructor totake the editorial review into account when assigning grades. Thereview had the effect of making the engineering students more awareof the importance of following the style guide, especially when theysaw their grade penalized for major deviations. A less salutary effectwas that it emphasized the editor's role in policing correctness. Sincethe editors were not members of the IPTs, it became very difficult todevelop relationships that would have emphasized the ways in whicheditors more positively assist writers.

In Year 3, with three editing teams, we attempted to correct thatproblem by assigning liaisons to each IPT. The original plan was foreach IPT to have a style editor, a review editor, and a re'sume* editor,i.e., an editor from each of the three ESTs. We thought that wouldenhance communication both between the ESTs and the IPTs andbetween the three ESTs themselves. Class attrition and problemsreconciling schedules resulted in each EST sending only one liaison toone IPT. Having an editor attend the weekly IPT meetings was notenough to develop good author-editor relationships. We can now seethat it would have been more effective if each EST had been assignedto work more closely with a single IPT on all project activitiesthroughout the term. At least one EST/IPT relationship did begin to

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develop on its own toward the end of the project, chiefly because oneof the editing teams was meeting regularly at the IPT project officeand began to develop a friendship with some of the engineeringstudents who were there. That led to one IPT leader actually askingto meet with editors to go over the team's draft final report. This wasthe first time in the three years of the project that the engineeringstudents actively sought editorial support.

Clearly, there is power in both arrangements. The editing teamsare like the discipline teams the engineering students form during thebaseline part of the project. Like the engineers, the editors need theirown group for training, for mutual support, and for sharing tasks thatbenefit all of the IPTs, like the job of creating a house style guide. IPTmembership mainly creates proximity by placing editors and authorstogether at regular meetings, which in itself may or may not lead totrust and good working relationships. For these relationships todevelop, teams need structural factors beyond proximity, factors likepositive interdependence and group processing.

Team Size, Composition, and Workload

The size and composition of the editing teams has varied consider-ably over the three years of this study (see Table 1), but the workloadhas remained fairly constant, the main variable being the amount ofeach kind of copyediting provided. In 1996, working as full IPTmembers, the editors copyedited far more than in any subsequent year,because in 1997 and 1998 we did not require editors to copyedit thefinal reports. In 1997 and 1998, we also limited the length of all threerequired reports. Each year there have been some beginning editorswith very highly developed editing and computer skills, and othersvery much challenged in these areas. One might assume that editorsparticipating in the project as an independent study (two advancedundergraduates in 1996) would have the best chance of success, sincethey have already developed the chief skills the course demands(editing and computer skills). Yet one of those students dropped thecourse because of the time commitment, while the other performedadequately and satisfied his IPT leader, but was barely able to keep upwith the pace.

We had hoped that involving graduate students would strengthenour capacity to meet the demands of the IPT class, and this wascertainly the case in 1998, when graduate students served as highlyeffective team leaders. Oddly enough, in 1997, the one year in whichwe had no graduate students involved and the smallest number ofeditors, those three undergraduates accomplished the same majorprojects that four did in 1996 and fourteen did in 1998. Moreover, the1997 undergraduate who returned as a graduate student team leader in1998 reported that it actually felt like less work in 1997. One reasonfor this result seems to be that in 1997, the editors weren't reallyintegrated into the IPT class and were not really functioning as a

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team. That is, working as a team may be harder than working alone ifthe team is not functioning well or lacks the talent needed for the job.It must be said, though, that the three students in 1997 workedextremely hard, one, for example, developing HTML skills virtuallyfrom scratch in order to get the class resume's online.

Hard work and reaching beyond what they thought they could dohas marked the work of all the editors participating in the IPT class.This kind of project takes far more time than any normal term project,even when 30% of the grade and nearly half of the class meetings areproject linked, as in the technical editing class. It also emphasizesdifferent skills. In a more traditional class, students working alone orin a very small group on a fairly simple project may have greateropportunity for fine tuning, for substantive editing, and for workingwith visuals and document design. The IPT class is more likely todevelop their capacity for "seat-of-the-pants" editing, learning thelesson that (to adapt a motto) meeting the deadline isn't everything-it's the only thing-and it still may not be enough.

In general, it is probably better not to link the IPT project to acourse that has regular exams and textbook assignments. The idealsituation for fully integrating editors into IPTs would be to have anofficial "IPT Class" that technical communication graduate studentsand very advanced undergraduates could take as a form of internshipor independent study. That is what we are working toward now,although we would still like to involve the students taking technicalediting in a limited way. Whatever the mix of students, it is essentialto provide class time for training editors, particularly in the computerskills needed for the project, but also in group processing. Studentswith a mixture of skill levels, such as those we had in 1998, can learnfrom each other if class scheduling permits them to be togetherregularly for project work. In the case where the entire pool of stu-dents available to work on the IPT project consists of three or fourstudents signed up for a technical editing class (as in Year 2), theproject probably should not be attempted at all, or perhaps on a verysmall scale, such as having the students form a re'sume' team. Becausethe learning curve is so steep and the situation so true to life, theeditors need to have completed their basic training first. Learningwhile doing works for some students, but it depends on how much theyhave to learn. Learning to copyedit and to use advanced Wordfeatures and to work on a team and to deal with engineering writingand to edit HTML for the Web proved to be too much for some,particularly those with family and work responsibilities on top ofschool.

GradingAccording to Johnson et al., both "positive interdependence" and

"individual accountability and personal responsibility" are created bythe way in which teachers set up evaluation and grading. The IPT

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class incorporates these essentials into its evaluation process: 50% ofthe IPT engineering students' semester grade is a group grade based onevaluation of reports and presentations at each stage of the project,20% is a participation grade based on evaluation by team members andthe IPT leader, and 30% is a final exam grade, based on an essay exam.But it has never been possible to grade all project editors in exactly thesame way that the IPTs are graded because the editors are drawnprimarily from a technical editing class in which the project is only30% of the course grade. That creates a perceived inequity that couldbest be removed by recruiting all the editors to a class focused entirelyon the project.

Table 2 shows the grading system used for technical editingstudents each year. In 1996, we did grade the two independent studyeditors who served on the IPTs in exactly the same way as the engi-neering students, but the other two project editors on the IPTs weretaking the technical editing class, so the project grade was only 30% oftheir course grade. After 1996, we abandoned a group grade for thesestudents and thus severed the chief structural connection to the IPTclass and the only component providing positive interdependencebetween engineers and editors. In 1997 and 1998 we devised a gradingsystem based entirely on individual performance, with a reward forwork done for other editing teams.

Researchers differ on the importance of assigning a group grade(Ledlow). Johnson and Johnson appear to believe it is essential forcreating positive interdependence, though they do distinguish positivereward interdependence from positive goal interdependence. A studythey conducted with another social scientist found that both kinds ofinterdependence are needed for the best results (Mensch et al.).Spencer Kagan, however, argues against using grades to motivate orcommunicate with students, asserting that grades should be used onlyto assess individual accomplishments ("Group Grades"). Similarly,Robert Slavin asserts that group grades are unnecessary, arguing thatpraise and other rewards of that kind are sufficient motivators (cited inLedlow). Our experience with the editing teams suggests that sharinga grade with the IPTs might have been useful as a motivator forparticipating in the IPTs, but that it might also simply add to thefrustration of working with a large, multidisciplinary team. It alsomight not fairly reward high-performing editors. In 1996, for example,the highest performing editor (ranked in the top 3 of the entire IPTclass) was a member of the IPT that earned the lowest team score.

ConclusionThe constant factor in all three years that editors have worked

with IPTs is that the project is exceptionally challenging for allinvolved, including the teachers. Naturally, we want to challenge thestudents to promote their intellectual and personal growth, so the

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challenge for us is how to avoid setting the bar too high. Each year wehave worked to simplify and clarify project requirements, so much sothat we feel most pleased with the project management in 1998. Still,even then, all of the editing team leaders agreed that their work wasmade difficult by the number and complexity of the tasks, the shortdeadlines, and the relative inexperience of most of the technicalediting students.

Based on our experience over the three years of this study, weintend to apply the following conclusions in future experiments withthe IPT class:

• Recruit graduate students or advanced undergraduates as team .leaders, making the project their only responsibility (i.e., not acomponent of another class).

• Attempt full-scale integration of editors only when we haveenough editors to provide an editing team (not just a singleeditor) for each IPT, using the compromise deployment planfrom Year 3.

• Set up positive interdependence between editors and the IPTs,either through group grades or some structural requirementwhereby students cannot succeed alone.

• Provide ample occasions for proximity between editors andengineers so that relationships can develop.

• Teach group processing and interpersonal skills directly (possiblylinked to bi-weekly status reports).

• Assess other skills (especially computer skills) and provide earlytraining. '

With these refinements, we believe that the opportunity foreditors and engineers to work together on a meaningful class project isone that can profit both groups in ways rarely available in traditionalclassrooms. Our challenge as teachers is to find ways to make theexperience as rewarding as it is challenging.

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Rose Norman is Associate Professor of English and directs the undergraduateand graduate technical writing program at UAH. She has published articles inTCQ, Technical Communication, IEEE Transactions in Professional Communi-cation, and JBTC, and is a contributor to Education in Scientific and TechnicalCommunication: Academic Programs That Work (1997).

Robert Frederick is Associate Professor of Mechanical and AerospaceEngineering at UAH, where he has developed an Aerospace PropulsionLaboratory, as well as a series of multidisciplinary design classes that useindustrial mentors. He has completed research projects in hybrid rocketpropellant development, rocket motor plume diagnostics, and rocket injectordesign, and is active in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics(AIAA).

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