Words Don't Come Easy to Me – Teaching Academic Writing to Engineering Students in the Age Of AI

Workshop Recommended citation: Deckert, C., & Söhnitz, S. (2025). Words Don’t Come Easy to Me – Teaching Academic Writing to Engineering Students in the Age Of AI. In Kangaslampi, R., Langie, G., Järvinen, H.-M., & Nagy, B. (Eds.), SEFI 53rd Annual Conference. European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI), Tampere, Finland. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17631224. This Conference Paper is brought to you for open access by the 53rd Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI) at Tampere University in Tampere, Finland. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License. WORDS DON’T COME EASY TO ME – TEACHING ACADEMIC WRITING TO ENGINEERING STUDENTS IN THE AGE OF AI C. Deckert a, 1 , S. Söhnitz b a Hochschule Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences, Düsseldorf, Germany, 0000-0001-6883-566X b Hochschule Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences, Düsseldorf, Germany, 0000-0003-3988-1768 Conference Key Areas: Engineer as a social debater – new skills needed?; Digital tools and AI in engineering education; Engineering skills, professional skills, and transversal skills Keywords: literacy, reading competence, writing competence, academic writing, critical thinking ABSTRACT The competence of academic writing is currently still a central requirement for obtaining an academic degree. However, in teaching academic writing, lecturers have to deal with the two challenges of decreasing reading competence in young people and increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in reading and writing assignments. In engineering in particular, literacy understood as reading and writing competence is essential - whether for understanding complex tasks, analysing case studies or dealing with technical documents such as the product requirements document. Against this background, it is crucial to develop strategies and discuss modern approaches to specifically promote students' reading and writing skills and thus create an essential basis for successful scientific work and problem-solving. This workshop aims to stimulate an interactive exchange and develop practical solutions in the three core areas strengthening reading competence, developing academic writing skills, and substituting for reading and writing assessments. 1 Corresponding Author C. Deckert [email protected] 1 BACKGROUND AND RATIONALE 1.1 Literacy as Reading and Writing Competence Besides numeracy and skills in the natural sciences, the engineering professions are also in need of a certain amount of literacy skills. The term literacy is not always clearly defined: In a narrow sense it comprises only reading competence, in a somewhat wider sense it also includes reading and writing competence, and sometimes the definition of literacy extends reading and writing by speaking and listening competence (Cambridge Assessment, 2013). In this workshop we focus on literacy as reading and writing competence, as we see reading competence as a main prerequisite for academic writing. In their Learning Compass 2030, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2020) defines literacy as “The ability to identify, understand, interpret, and create with written, spoken, visual and multi-modal texts. Literate students are able to decode and construct different types of texts appropriate for life in and out of school. These texts will include subject-specific texts (such as those required in science or history) and visual texts such as diagrams and graphs”. According to the OECD (2020), literacy is the foundation for core cognitive skills of communication, creativity, and critical thinking. Engineering students need reading competence to understand e.g. calculation exercises (which are often presented in text form), case studies, and student project descriptions (e.g. a product requirements document). Apart from these functional considerations, students should also be able to read and understand complex argumentations to develop their thinking and reasoning skills. In a sense, you are what you read: “Reading well awakens and broadens the mind. It provides a vast realm of inner experience that extends far beyond everyday life” (DiYanni, 2022, p. ix). Academic writing understood as professional writing used in a university setting is needed by engineering students to write term papers, internship reports, lab reports, student project reports, and – finally – their opus magnum: the thesis. Again, functional considerations aside, there is an educational tradition that describes “writing as thinking”. Writing can be understood as “thinking that uses paper or other media to externalize and manipulate symbolic expressions” (Oatley & Djikic, 2008, p. 9). Even if this might be overstated, writing usually is a prerequisite of higher-order thinking and writing and critical thinking reinforce each other (Kaag & van Belle, 2024). In this sense “Writing is not simply a matter of expressing pre-existing thoughts clearly. It’s the process through which ideas are produced and refined” (Mintz, 2021). According to the international Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) reading performance of most countries dropped between 2018 and 2022, both in highest-scoring and weakest young students. Ireland – host country of the SEFI 2023 conference – has the highest mean score among European countries (OECD, 2023). In Germany, the reading competence of young students – as measured by PISA – has fallen significantly between 2012 and 2022 and is now near the OECD average. The country has a comparatively high number of adolescents with weak reading competence for a country near the OECD average (Heine et al., 2023, p. 151). The results of the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) show that literacy has declined or remained stable in comparison to the last survey and has declined more strongly for men than for women. About a quarter of the adult population scores at the two lowest levels in literacy. Finland – venue of the SEFI 2025 conference – has the highest mean score of literacy (OECD, 2024). 1.2 Literacy of Engineering Students Engineers need reading and writing skills to understand and/or generate e.g. lab and project reports, product requirements documents, operating manuals for technical equipment, and market or technology trend studies in their practical work. If they pursue a job in science and research, they need to be able to read and write scholarly publications such as journal articles, research reports and surveys as well as laboratory studies. Furthermore, in their societal role as informed citizens, they need to be able to understand e.g. political news and general statistics on economic and technological developments. To better understand the reading and writing habits of our engineering students, we conducted a survey in a course on academic writing visited by university students from the sixth semester. Most of the students participating in the course (25 out of 29) answered the survey at the beginning of the semester. Most of our students (in total 72%) don’t read books at all (32%) or only one book per quarter or less (40%). Only 28% of the students read one book per month or one book every two weeks or more. 64% of our students read no newspapers or magazines on a regular basis. With regard to writing habits, 44% of the students answered that they have privately never written any long text. Students who have written long texts wrote (in descending order) professional articles (28%), short stories (28%), newspaper articles (20%), and poetry (poem, song lyrics, rap, …) (16%), and one student even wrote a novel. As part of their studies, all students had to write a text. Most of the students wrote lab reports (68%) and internship reports (64%) followed by term papers (40%), student project reports (36%), and professional articles (12%). Main problems in academic writing according to our students (see fig. 1) are the technical aspects of writing such as literature research and evaluation of sources (52%) and citation (44%), the internal structural aspects of writing such as articulating their own thoughts (44%), summarizing other sources (32%) and argumentation (24%), as well as developing the external text structure (32%). Motivation is seen as a challenge by 28% of our students, mainly the ones who do not read or write much. No student perceives spelling and grammar as one of the main problems in academic writing, although the writers confirmed through proofreading their papers that they definitely exist as a difficulty for some of the students. The influence of artificial intelligence (AI) tools based on large language models (LLMs), particularly ChatGPT, on university learning is not yet fully understood. While a meta-analysis of experimental studies by Deng et al. (2025) finds a positive impact of ChatGPT on academic performance and higher-order thinking, other studies find negative effects on reasoning and argumentation (Stadler et al., 2024) and critical thinking (Gerlich, 2025; Valcea et al., 2024). However, it seems to be uncontested that the use of AI tools such as ChatGPT has an impact on both reading and writing habits of students, as it can summarize complicated texts and write academic or at least academic-sounding texts on various topics. Ravselj et al. (2025, p. 3) find in their survey of 23,218 students from 109 countries and territories that students find ChatGPT useful for “simplifying complex information and summarizing content” and already widely use it for reading and writing texts, while believing it will increase their chance for achieving better grades. Valcea et al. (2024) argue that the use of AI for lower-level tasks which formerly required reading and writing skills by students leads to weakened higher-order thinking skills, so that AI boosts the performance of experts but restrains the learning efforts of novices. For university teachers, this means that a task involving a simple literature analysis is now of limited value, as it might be easily performed with the help of ChatGPT or similar AI tools. Fig. 1. Main Problems in Academic Writing (n = 25, up to three possible answers) 2 WORKSHOP OBJECTIVES 2.1 Target audience Faced with the challenges of decreasing reading and writing abilities and the threats posed by ChatGPT, this workshop addresses the possibilities of teaching academic writing to engineering students in order to increase their literacy. Thus, the target audience in a narrow sense are educators and lecturers who are faced with the challenge to teach academic writing under the altered conditions. However, since many engineering courses rely on literacy, the wider target audience includes educators and lecturers with courses including some form of reading assignment or writing assessment. In the widest sense, the target audience includes every lecturer concerned about the quality and results of the final thesis of their students which up till now requires intensive reading and writing competence. 2.2 Expected learning outcomes The workshop is a qualitative research approach to gather the experiences and perspectives of the participants, which can be seen as a first step and a preparation for possible further quantitative research. The learning outcomes of this workshop are two-fold: The first target is to gather experiences from educators from different countries as a foundation to learn from the diverse experiences and to better understand the challenge and its implications for engineering education. The second target is to collect and discuss possible solution approaches to teach academic writing to engineering students under the altered circumstances of declining literacy and the disruption by ChatGPT. The possible solutions should focus on three core areas: • Strengthening reading competence • Developing academic writing skills 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% Literature research and evaluation of sources Citation Articulating my own thoughts Summarizing other sources Text structure Motivation Argumentation Time Academic/technical language Spelling and grammar Others • Substituting for reading and writing assessments These categories cover the effects on learning outcomes as well as the impact on the method of examination. 3 WORKSHOP DESIGN 3.1 Time plan The timetable of the workshop is displayed in table 1. After a short introduction to give an impulse for the topic consisting of key terms, current data, and a definition of the challenge, the participants will discuss their experiences with academic writing in small groups. The results will be shared and discussed in the entire group afterward to establish a background for the discussion about possible solutions. This discussion will, again, take place as a small group exercise, before the main results will be shared with the entire group for a final discussion and conclusion of the workshop. Table 1. Time plan Run time Activity Notes 4 min Welcome & Introduction Introducing key terms Clarify workshop objectives. 7 min Short Input & best practice Brief presentation on the issue: What deficiencies exist? Why are these competencies crucial? Examples from different countries (Presentation of data from PISA/PIAAC) 12 min Interactive activity 1 Small group exercise (3-5 participants): Discuss experience with academic writing from your university Results documented on flipcharts or digital board (e.g. Miro) 7 min Discussion Share experiences with the whole group 20 min Interactive activity 2 Small group exercise: Possible solutions to teach students academic writing Guiding questions: What methods have been effective? What new approaches could help? 10 min Discussion and conclusions Share solutions with the group 3.2 Interactivity The workshop contains two interactive activities in the form of small group exercises. In the first activity experiences with academic writing are discussed in small groups to lay the foundation for the next phase. In the second interactive phase, possible solutions to teach students academic writing will be collected and discussed. 4 WORKSHOP RESULTS In the workshop, 24 people from the conference participated. The participants mainly came from Europe (Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Turkey, the UK), but a small minority came from outside of Europe (USA, Australia). In the first discussion about the experiences, it became clear that all participants have similar experiences as the ones expressed in chapter 1.2. The following results emerged from the group discussions about possible solutions in the three given categories: • Strengthening reading competence: Possible solution approaches at the course level are to discuss the importance of reading and the connection to writing with students, to teach reading strategies, and to make students read more during lecture time. To assist this purpose, there can be frequent feedback, reading quizzes, or short checks of comprehension to determine text understanding and motivate reading. Outside of courses, it could help to form reading groups or organized reading sessions to overcome the time constraints during lectures, and to offer specific AI training for lecturers. • Developing academic writing skills: One possible solution at the study program level is to develop guidelines for professional AI use and to let students declare their AI use in papers. Possible solution approaches at the course level are to discuss the importance of writing (“writing as thinking”), to let students write in class to practice their skills, to use AI in the course as an assistive tool or even for co-creation during the writing process as well as to let students correct the mistakes of AI-written texts so that students learn the possibilities and limitations of AI use, and to use narrative explanations on calculations or (science) fiction stories to teach students writing skills. • Substituting for reading and writing assessments: Possible solutions in this category are to move from written to oral assessments or presentations, to conduct paper exams in class without AI assistance, and to have automated or peer feedback on written texts. A downside of this approach is that some competences might get lost if the method of examination changes. As one group of participants writes: “Can’t replace all writing assessments because students are still required to write a thesis at the end of their degrees”. In the ensuing discussion the following three threads emerged: • See the impact of AI tools such as ChatGPT as analogous to the impact of the pocket calculator on mathematics or the Global Positioning System (GPS) on navigation and develop academic writing assessments that take this fact into account (e.g. allow AI use for spelling and phrasing). • Go into the offensive and incorporate ChatGPT in the learning process of academic writing to teach students a basic understanding as well as the pros and cons of the tool in this regard. • Focus more on the students who are willing to learn academic writing and don’t design the course around the unwilling ones to close loopholes (As one participant put it: “I don’t want to spend my time policing students who don’t want to learn.”). One final insight of the workshop is that the technological development cannot be reversed and that the use of AI in academic writing will not diminish. Therefore, there is an urgent need for the academic community to find solutions, if we still want students to be able to understand and write academic texts. 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors would like to thank the participants of the workshop for their active cooperation and their valuable input. REFERENCES Cambridge Assessment (2013). What is literacy? An investigation into definitions of English as a subject and the relationship between English, literacy and ‘being literate’. https://www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/Images/130433-what-is-literacy-aninvestigation-into-definitions-of-english-as-a-subject-and-the-relationship-betweenenglish-literacy-and-being-literate-.pdf Deng, R., Jiang, M., Yu, X., Lu, Y., & Liu, S. (2025). Does ChatGPT enhance student learning? A systematic review and meta-analysis of experimental studies. 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