Designing a Course for Peer Educators in Undergraduate Engineering Design Courses.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]