Senior Theses

The study of Typography, or the design and style of print, is becoming more common in the Technical Communication field. Many researchers have studied aspects varying from reading comprehension, to the effect of typography has on a document as a whole. While most of these studies have been focused on art and design effects, there is a need for this type of research to be conducted using students within the STEM fields. This mixed method study was conducted at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology where there is a high focus on STEM disciplines. A range of students from three mandatory English classes were surveyed on their perception of six different fonts, and from that, five students participated in a follow up interview where their past experiences, preferences, and their process of choosing a font was discussed. The results showed that most students focused on the technical and professional aspects of fonts which they identified to have similar shapes and designs. Students reported using a universally accepted font in their writing or changing their font choice depending on what discipline they were writing for. This shows that, while they can identify what fonts would be appropriate in STEM writing there is not one specific font that is best used among all fields. Each field has their own format and design specifying how they like their writing, and through this knowledge, teachers and professionals can begin to teach writers how to write for different fields within STEM writing.

While most technical communicators and scientists will eventually create some valuable intellectual property (IP) worth protecting, survey based studies like Rife (2010) suggest that many STEM professionals and academics lack the key skills required to protect their ideas adequately. The purpose of this experimental study is to determine if there is a quantifiable gap in IP knowledge and ethical attitudes between STEM students and professionals. To test for these gaps in knowledge and ethical attitudes, I administered a mixed methods survey to 45 students and 98 professionals originating from the same STEM university. The survey contained seven knowledge questions testing general IP law and four Likert-type questions to test attitudes about ethical scenarios. STEM professionals did significantly better than students on the knowledge section of the test, though the professionals had room to improve. The professionals were more ethically conservative than the students, though both tended to rank toward the ethical what they thought was legal. The STEM professionals have learned IP law skills in the workplace that were not seen in students. As such, students might benefit from further work-learning experiences during college that could supplement their IP knowledge. The findings from this study are intended to help future educational initiatives improve field specific IP knowledge in workplace professionals by compensating for knowledge gaps that begin in college curricula.

Higher Education environments like NMT are experiencing problems with the adoption of learning management systems (LMS). The study explores what factors impact the perception of usability of the LMS Canvas to identify existing problems for faculty members and students. The problems with effective implementation of Canvas may be due to a variety of factors, including problems with attitude, personality, misunderstandings about Canvas, lack of training for faculty members and administration. To explore these factors, a random sample of 53 students and faculty members were individually and anonymously surveyed, and four interviews were conducted with a convenience sample of two students and two faculty members. There were three main findings: first, it was found that the majority of NMT used Canvas. Second, faculty members and students are both generally positive about Canvas’ usability. Finally, faculty members and students do not know what the Canvas features are, nor do they know how to use them. There were design problems with the survey, which impacted the study. It would be valuable to speak with the administration in charge about their perception of faculty adoption, evaluate the current NMT Canvas workshops, explore effective training techniques.

We face a problem in education where the information students learn in class is fragmented and lacking context. With this study, I hoped to find out how a commercial video game could be used as an experimental form of learning to improve the technical communication skills of a two person team, and if those skills could be transferred to real world scenarios. I recruited 4 pairs of students for my study, and had them take a pretest, play a video game, and then take a posttest to find out if they decreased the amount of time it took to complete the tests and how they changed their communication strategies while playing the game. This study shows that video games can be harnessed as a tool to improve players’ technical communication and collaboration skills, and that these skills are transferable to real world activities immediately after a play session. Video games are a powerful tool for experiential education, and they are a tool that can be used in technical communication courses today.

Technical communicators are poised with the skills to be civically engaged in their communities. Sexual Assault continues to be a social public health issue confronting many communities and college campuses. Understanding each campus individually is necessary to effectively address its individual needs in terms of sexual assault prevention. Research for New Mexico Tech was conducted through a climate survey. The results show that more education and better communication is needed about resources for NMT’s entire community; participants report that campus seems safer for males than females, and students, faculty, and staff need more training to act as active bystanders and allies to victims. Because of the data collected, the Society for Technical Communication Trinitite Chapter implemented an awareness campaign, called Paint Tech Teal. This campaign had three major goals which directly addressed the areas that need improvement.

The responsibility for ethical rhetoric or persuasion from religious teachers has been well- established, directly by St. Augustine and indirectly by Plato and Sharon Crowley. Rhetoric within religious discourse communities shapes the values and belief system of the community. This study examined the values of the discourse community that is Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, as shaped by the rhetoric of its religious teacher, Joel Osteen. The intention is to draw conclusions about the values of Osteen’s discourse community as compared to the larger Christian discourse community, and the role of meta-knowledge in the community.

Risk communication informs people’s understanding and shapes their actions to minimize negative consequences. Research into the role that data representation plays in the understanding of risk has been studied for broad populations but has not been applied to finite populations, such as science and engineering students. Undergraduate students at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology participated in a survey that compared visual and numerical data representation for risk scenarios and asked for students to paraphrase their understanding. The results were analyzed for averages and statistical significance, and for emergent themes. This study found that numeric data representation and prior familiarity with the subject increased user’s understanding of risk scenarios. Currently in the technical communication field, there is research on how visually representing data increases understanding of risk for people with low numeracy. This finding has led to the assumption that the visual representations of data increase the understanding of risk communication for all people. The findings of this study challenge our understanding of how best to represent data and requires further research. 

Although many studies examine technical communication research from vari- ous qualitative perspectives and make recommendations for future directions, little work offers us a way to continuously evaluate our research for congruity with these recommendations. To address this need, I present a new heuristic for self-evaluation in our field. In this paper I use research abstracts to qual- itatively categorize the research published in the past five years (2012–2016) in our top five journals into the eleven TC Body of Knowledge topic cate- gories described by Nancy Coppola in 2010. This quantitative approach of one topic per abstract produces a set of descriptive statistics that allows us to see the shape of our current research. Of the 331 articles I studied, almost 25% fell into the “Information Design and Development” category, while there are only two articles in the “Standards” category; the rest of the published research ab- stracts fell into two groups: five categories each show up about 10%–13% of the time, and the other four each show up about 3%–6% of the time. These re- sults demonstrate that using abstracts to quantify the research by topic allows us to accountably and continuously compare our research output against our perceptions and expectations.

Little to no research has been done on the impact of design on perception of website security. This study used mixed methods surveys to collect quantitative and qualitative data that would benefit the understanding of perception of website security. Both statistical analysis and recursive emergent themes analysis were used to interpret the data that this study collected. This study found the following:New Mexico Tech students agree with general design principles,students are more likely to trust a well-designed website,students are more likely to spend more time on a well-designed website, students are cautious with their credit card information and would rather use alternate secure means of payment.This is beneficial to the field of Technical Communication because it proves that research into design and development impact other areas of consideration for people using websites.