Guadagni, G., & Ma, H., & Wheeler, L. (2018, June), The Benefit of Training Undergraduate Teaching Assistants  Paper presented at 2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--31079

\bibitem{asee_peer_31079}
  Guadagni, G., \& Ma, H., \& Wheeler, L. (2018, June), \emph{The Benefit of Training Undergraduate Teaching Assistants}
  Paper presented at 2018 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition , Salt Lake City, Utah.
  10.18260/1-2--31079

Gianluca Guadagni, Hui Ma, and Lindsay Wheeler.  "The Benefit of Training Undergraduate Teaching Assistants".  2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Salt Lake City, Utah, 2018, June.  ASEE Conferences, 2018.  https://strategy.asee.org/31079 Internet.  08 Jun, 2024

\bibitem{asee_peer_31079}
  Gianluca Guadagni, Hui Ma, and Lindsay Wheeler.
  "The Benefit of Training Undergraduate Teaching Assistants".
  \emph{2018 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition , Salt Lake City, Utah, 2018, June}.
  ASEE Conferences, 2018.
  https://strategy.asee.org/31079 Internet.  08 Jun, 2024

@INPROCEEDINGS{asee_peer_31079
author = "Gianluca Guadagni, Hui Ma, and Lindsay Wheeler"
title = "The Benefit of Training Undergraduate Teaching Assistants"
booktitle = "2018 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition "
year = "2018"
month = "June"
address = "Salt Lake City, Utah"
publisher = "ASEE Conferences"
note = {https://strategy.asee.org/31079}
number = {10.18260/1-2--31079}
}

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - We report on a new program to train Undergraduate TAs that we are
implementing in Applied Mathematics at our Engineering School. 

Undergraduate Teaching Assistants [UTAs] provide a fundamental support
to our educational mission. 

We started to employ UTAs, as an experiment, in 2014 and we have
reported about the details in [1]. After few years many more courses
in our school have introduced UTAs in their class activities and the
project has grown substantially. 

Many of our UTAs have no teaching experience, which is expected since
they are quite young and hardly had any practice of teaching. In the
past we relied mostly on their personal skills and on their ability to
adjust rapidly to the new environment. Most of them were the top of their
class and very brilliant, they would learn quickly. Moreover, their inexperience had a limited impact.    

Since the early years, the scope of UTAs activity has evolved, in
several cases they are superseding Graduate Teaching Assistants and
the time they spend tutoring students is now greater than it used to
be at the beginning. Their role is more relevant, and their
inexperience can have a greater impact on the class. In addition  we are
recruiting many more UTAs, and we cannot expect from all the same
exceptional response we had from the few. 

To fill the gap in training, we created a course on ``Teaching
methods'' and we now require all UTAs to enroll in it. The class
provides tools and support for UTAs to reflect on the several aspects
of their activity, from the most effective teaching practices
student-centered and inquiry based, to relevant educational methods,
grading techniques, including tips to improve interpersonal skills. 

At the end of Fall 17 semester we will collect the first batch of data
on the project. This will include self-assessment from UTAs,
evaluations from instructors, students' feedback on UTAs, and their
performance on the ``Teaching methods'' course.

This project is a second step (the first step is reported in [1]) in
an ongoing effort to improve our students' learning experience, facilitating in class pedagogies that have proven to be extremely effective [2,3]. At the same time, we want to offer students, who become UTAs, a fulfilling and enriching
experience to add to their college formation. A significant part of
this research is to understand how UTAs pick up the ``non content
knowledge'' and how this knowledge can influence their personal and
professional growth as future engineers.  


AU  - Gianluca Guadagni
AU  - Hui Ma
AU  - Lindsay Wheeler
CY  - Salt Lake City, Utah
DA  - 2018/06/23
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - The Benefit of Training Undergraduate Teaching Assistants
UR  - https://strategy.asee.org/31079
DO  - 10.18260/1-2--31079
ER  -