Presentation
Designing a Course for Peer Educators in Undergraduate Engineering Design Courses
American Society for Engineering Education
(2017)
Abstract
Learning Assistants (LAs) are undergraduate peer educators who participate in weekly pedagogy
seminars and work alongside faculty instructors in active-learning based undergraduate courses.
While LA programs were initially developed for science and math courses, many LA programs
support LAs in a wide range of disciplines. This paper describes a pilot adaptation of the LA
program for engineering design courses that we have developed at the University of Maryland,
College Park Campus. All LAs assist in 14 separate sections of University of Maryland’s
engineering design course for first-year undergraduate students. Our seminar integrates topics
from the discipline-general LA pedagogy seminar (cognitive science of learning, facilitation of
classroom discourse, collaboration, metacognition) with topics especially relevant to engineering
design (design reviews, design thinking, expert-novice practices in engineering design,
engineering epistemology, teamwork and equity). While seminar goals aligned with the goals of
LA programs nationally, our seminar design team also articulated several values which guided
the design of our seminar: a) helping LAs reframe their role as supporting growth rather than
evaluation, b) valuing a broad set of metrics of success from day one, c) celebrating that different
students bring in different expertise, and disrupting overly simplistic expertise/novice
dichotomies, d) acknowledging that we all have different starting points and valuing a plurality
of goals, e) helping our students track their own progress through reflecting on concrete
representations of their thinking, and f) supporting LAs in developing deep disciplinary
knowledge of design thinking. This paper describes the embodiment of these goals by
highlighting several key features of the seminar. We conduct quantitative and qualitative analysis
of several data sources (surveys, instructor reflections, field notes, and coursework) to assess the
extent to which the embodiment of our values helped us meet our goals. Finally, we describe
challenges and identify areas where we were not meeting our goals and describe some of the
aspects of the seminar that we plan to revise in the next iteration.
Disciplines
Publication Date
2017
Location
Columbus, Ohio
Comments
This article was originally presented at the 2017 ASEE Annual Conference Exposition, Columbus, Ohio, and can also be found at this link.
© 2017 American Society for Engineering Education
Citation Information
Gina M. Quan, Chandra Anne Turpen, Ayush Gupta and Emilia Dewi Tanu. "Designing a Course for Peer Educators in Undergraduate Engineering Design Courses" American Society for Engineering Education (2017) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/gina-quan/10/