The summer after my sophomore year, I began my work in the Designing Education Lab. As an engineer and a designer, I wanted to learn more about the teaching side of education - how were classes designed to benefit the student learning experience? I was involved in evaluating early engineers' technical writing in the form of abstracts. Students had written these abstracts to describe their self-designed statics problem.

The analysis process involved "coding," reading the abstracts for particular common qualities determined to be the mark of a good abstract, and comparing the abstracts from Fall 2013 to those from Winter 2014. Between those two quarters, the instructions given to students were altered to provide more background information.

After analysis of the abstracts, we determined that there was a middle ground of how much information to provide to students, The instructions provided to students in Fall 2014 were simplified, and students were provided with generalized grading abstracts to refer to during the writing process. 

Below is the poster from the SURI poster presentation, and this work was written up into a paper presented at the ASEE Conference in 2015.