Feedback and Assessment of Student Work on Model-Eliciting Activities: Undergraduate Teaching Assistants’ Perceptions and Strategies

Model-Eliciting-Activities (MEAs) are open-ended en gi eering problems that engage students in authentic modeling situations that professional eng ineers encounter. For seven years, Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) were the primary point o f contact and source of feedback for students during the implementation of MEAs in a lar ge first-year engineering course. The recent addition and change in role of a significant number of Undergraduate Teaching Assistants (UGTAs) to the instructional team created the need for modifications to the TA Professional Development (PD) with MEAs. The purpose of this pap er is to investigate UGTAs perceptions of and strategies for providing feedback and assess m nt of student work and summarize the challenges faced by them. Further studies will util ize these findings to modify the current MEA Rubric and task specific support materials and improve th e TA PD.