Integrating Cooperative Learning Strategies in Teaching Creative Writing to Engineering Students: A Mixed-Methods Study

Abstract

Creative writing is increasingly relevant in engineering education because it develops linguistic competence, imagination, critical thinking, empathy, collaboration, and the ability to communicate ideas effectively. However, engineering students frequently perceive writing as an individual linguistic exercise rather than a creative and collaborative process. Conventional teacher-centred approaches may provide limited opportunities for interaction, peer learning, idea generation, and collaborative revision. The present study investigates the effectiveness of integrating cooperative learning strategies into the teaching of creative writing to engineering students. A mixed-methods research design was adopted to examine changes in students’ creative writing performance and their perceptions of cooperative learning. For the illustrative research model presented in this paper, 60 first-year engineering students participated in a six-week instructional intervention. Students worked in heterogeneous cooperative groups and participated in brainstorming, think-pair-share, collaborative story construction, peer feedback, group editing, and reflective activities. Pre- and post-intervention creative writing tasks were evaluated using a rubric covering content and originality, organization, vocabulary and language use, creativity, and coherence. Quantitative findings from the illustrative dataset indicate an improvement in mean writing scores from 61.8 in the pre-test to 76.9 in the post-test. Qualitative evidence from student reflections and focus-group interactions suggests that cooperative learning supported idea generation, reduced writing anxiety, strengthened peer interaction, and encouraged students to revise their writing more critically. The paper argues that structured cooperative learning can transform creative writing instruction for engineering students from an individual language exercise into an interactive process of generating, negotiating, drafting, reviewing, and refining ideas.