University graduation dissertation for civil engineering students in China is considered to have wide-ranging contents, heavy workload, and full of difficulties. Incorporating innovative capability cultivation into graduation dissertation meets the needs for improving students’ overall quality and providing high-end engineering talents. Issues exist in current graduation dissertation including outdated topics, negative learning attitude, passive education mode, and lacking of practice. To address these issues, instruction methods including offering more types of dissertation topics, updating design contents up to practical engineering, motivating students’ proactivity, playing the guiding role of teachers, making reasonably in-depth instruction plan, and emphasizing more on practices are proposed. Those proposed methods are expected to contribute to the enhancement of graduation dissertation.