Preparing undergraduate 'learning assistants' to teach in design courses

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Engineering is not just the application of mathematics and science to address real-world problems and create new products; it involves design thinking, a creative, collaborative, yet systematic process by which engineering teams design products or solutions. For this reason, many undergraduate engineering programs require first-year students to take an Introduction to Engineering Design course in which teams of students work to design a product or solution. Because these courses can be large, universities often employ undergraduate or graduate teaching assistants to help the student teams make progress. However, these teaching assistants often face two major challenges. First, although it is easy to simply tell the student teams what to do, it is much harder for teaching assistants to cultivate their students' design thinking, which can enable students to surmount obstacles and arrive at their own solutions. Second, university engineering programs, reflecting the engineering profession, include disproportionately few women, students from certain minority groups, and students from lower-income backgrounds; and teaching assistants often need to make sure that these underrepresented students (as well as quieter students from all backgrounds) get to participate equitably in the student teams. In this project, researchers and engineering educators at the University of Maryland are testing a new approach to teaching the teaching assistants in engineering design courses. The teaching assistants take a pedagogy course intended to prepare them to foster the student teams' design thinking and equitable participation of all team members. As a result, the students of these teaching assistants become better at engaging in collaborative engineering design, which sets them up to become better engineers once they enter the profession. Specifically, the project staff is teaching a 3-credit pedagogy course to undergraduate teaching assistants, based on the Learning Assistant model from the University of Colorado. The pedagogy course integrates topics from general STEM learning-assistant pedagogy courses, such as the cognitive science of learning, facilitation of classroom discourse, and metacognition, with topics targeting engineering design: design reviews, design thinking, expert vs. novice practices in design, engineering epistemology, teamwork and equity. Research on the effects of the pedagogy course addresses two overarching research questions: (1) How do teaching assistants' interactions with Engineering Design students affect the students' immediate actions, and what effects do students think the teaching assistants have on their longer-term growth, with respect to (a) design thinking and (b) enactment of equity as reflected in communication, teamwork, etc. (2) How does the pedagogy course influence teaching assistants' pedagogical beliefs and interactions with students, with respect to how the teaching assistants notice and respond to (a) students' design thinking and (b) threats to equity. The research team is taking a design-based research approach, an iterative cycle of (i) collecting and analyzing data, (ii) forming hypotheses about how and why the teaching assistants did and did not learn specific ideas or enact those ideas in their classroom instruction, and (iii) testing those hypotheses by modifying the next round of the pedagogy course. Data include selected coursework from the pedagogy course; videorecordings of teaching assistants' interactions with student teams and what the teams do after the teaching assistant leaves; post-semester surveys of the videorecorded student teams about their experiences with the teaching assistant; and multiple interviews with the teaching assistants about particular instructional decisions they made. This work informs the creation and improvement of courses and programs that aim to prepare teaching assistants for engineering design courses.