CEEES - Impact of Role as Undergraduate TA in Engineering Education

This research effort will be twofold: (i) understand the national landscape of the use of undergraduate teaching assistants, their training, and their role/impact on the course; (ii) investigate the impact of being an undergraduate teaching assistant on the student. 

In the first semester of this project, we will start with a comprehensive literature analysis. The literature analysis will include the topics of impact of undergraduate teaching assistants (especially when compared to graduate teaching assistants), the training of teaching assistants (with an emphasis on undergraduate teaching assistants), and the impact that being a teaching assistant has on the undergraduate students themselves. 

Depending on time (and number of credits of research), the work will then expand to designing and implementing a survey and measurement instruments to collect information from various institutions across the United States (of both first-year engineering courses and civil engineering courses) to form a database of classes that utilize undergraduate teaching assistants. The database will include information such as student-to-TA ratios, number of graduate/undergraduate TAs, training processes of TAs, work requirements of TAs, etc. 

In future semesters, the research team will leverage this database to identify trends in using undergraduate teaching assistants in the classroom, the training of these teaching assistants, the impact of being an undergraduate teaching assistant, and identify gaps in the literature. This project intends to put together an NSF RIEF (https://www.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/pfe-rief-pfe-research-initiation-engineering-formation) focused on the topic of undergraduate teaching assistants to study the identified gaps in understanding the role and impact of undergraduate teaching assistants both on the students in the course and the teaching assistants themselves.