Perspectives and practices of undergraduate/graduate teaching assistants on writing pedagogical knowledge and lab report evaluation in engineering laboratory courses

Engineering undergraduate lab sections are often instructed by undergraduate or graduate teaching assistants (U/GTAs), who also grade lab reports and provide feedback. Although U/GTAs contribute extensively to the assessment of lab reports, their perspectives and understanding of writing pedagogy are largely unknown. U/GTAs are primarily trained as writers in engineering; however, they are often novices in writing knowledge and its pedagogy. The electrical engineering and mechanical engineering programs of Washington State University Vancouver have conducted professional development workshops for the U/GTAs (n=6) who instruct engineering lab courses and/or grade lab reports. The goal of the workshops was to enhance the U/GTAs’ knowledge of writing and lab report evaluation to support and improve engineering undergraduate students’ lab report writing. The workshop contents consisted of 1) lab instructors’ expectations, 2) the fundamentals of lab report writing (rhetorical features of lab reports), and 3) productive feedbacks. The workshops were offered to six U/GTAs from five courses (two sophomore, two junior, and one senior electrical engineering lab courses). In order to identify the overall effectiveness of the workshops, we conducted the survey and focus group with the U/GTAs to investigate their writing background, their understanding of audience awareness, their perspectives and understanding of writing instruction, and their lab report evaluation processes. We also collected the graded lab reports to investigate feedback comments. This paper discusses the U/GTAs’ perspectives and their practices of writing pedagogies in the lab courses. The knowledge generated from this study has provided a direction for refining the professional development workshops for U/GTAs in the present and future.