Improving The Writing Evaluation Abilities Of Graduate Teaching Assistants In Ece Labs

In 1999, faculty in the Bagley College of Engineering at Mississippi State University began a project to improve the writing-evaluation skills of graduate teaching assistants (TAs) in charge of undergraduate laboratories in electrical and computer engineering (ECE). Long considered valuable for discipline-specific undergraduate writing experiences, undergraduate laboratories have also proven problematic due to the large gaps between sound writing-instruction pedagogy, the standards and expectations of engineering faculty members for their students’ written work, and the actual writing instruction/grading provided by lab TAs, many of whom neither speak nor write English as their first language.