Copyright 2001, American Society for Engineering Education Session 3561 Integration of Communication Skills into the Introductory Material and Energy Balances Course in Chemical Engineering

For many years, companies have been suggesting that we must give our students more practice in oral presentations prior to graduation. More recently, ABET has added requirements for including more communication skills into the curricula in addition to all of the other topics we must cover. In response to these recent changes, we present a novel method of integrating communication skills into the introductory Material and Energy Balances Course in chemical engineering. While it may not seem obvious, students are capable of running the discussion sessions instead of the professor or teaching assistant. We have successfully converted our traditional discussion sessions into student-run sessions with no loss of continuity in the material and no loss of rigor in the material covered. This success was carried out in a class with 56 students that met three times a week in fifty-minute lectures, and once a week for a fifty-minute discussion session. In this work, we discuss a methodology for selecting student presentation groups to greatly reduce many problems of implementing group activities. We also discuss activities that made the transition go smoothly for these students into group work. The timeline for the discussion sessions is then described, along with the evaluation tools used to measure student performance. Student comments about the group presentations are also discussed so that a feedback mechanism for improvement in the implementation of this plan can be created. Samples of the student presentation materials are also briefly discussed. I