2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Large lab classes often rely on graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) to operate at scale. However, this approach presents challenges, especially when such courses aim to enhance students’ communication skills, which are crucial for engineers in professional contexts. Technical report writing—often used to convey lab experiment findings—can be particularly challenging for students, and GTAs, who often lack formal training in communication pedagogy, frequently feel uncomfortable with assessing these assignments. While GTAs make it possible to assess report writing in a class of ~230 students, research and anecdotal evidence show that GTAs, who often lack formal training in communication pedagogy, frequently feel uncomfortable with communication-based assignments. This discomfort can lead to inconsistent grading and less effective feedback for students. To address this issue, we implemented audience avatars as a pedagogical tool.

Audience avatars were developed to help students better understand their audiences' needs, enabling more effective communication choices when writing technical reports for laboratory experiments. Additionally, the avatars were designed to support GTAs by providing them with a structured framework for assessing student communication, thus making grading more intuitive and increasing GTA confidence in both written and oral feedback. For example, GTAs were asked to assess lab reports from the point of view of an engineering firm section leader (the internal avatar) as to whether the student team’s report was appropriate to be sent to the client (the external avatar).

This work-in-progress paper evaluates the effectiveness of the audience avatars in supporting GTAs in their role as assessors within a lab-based context. To explore this, we conducted a post-semester survey of 19 GTAs (across two complementary mechanical engineering lab courses), with 11 respondents providing feedback on their experience. The survey was complemented by follow-up interviews with four GTAs, which will be coded and analyzed for the final version of the paper. The survey results indicated that 10 out of 11 GTAs found the use of audience avatars either “very helpful” or “helpful” in understanding, guiding, and evaluating students’ communication skills. Many also reported feeling more confident in their ability to give constructive feedback to students.

These preliminary results suggest that audience avatars can significantly aid GTAs in assessing student communication, both by providing a clearer framework for evaluation and by increasing GTA confidence in their feedback. The positive reception of the avatars highlights their potential to address common challenges GTAs face when grading communication-based assignments in large engineering lab courses. As this is a work in progress, future analysis will focus on coding and interpreting interview data to further explore how audience avatars influence GTA assessment practices and the broader implications for engineering education. We anticipate that these findings will contribute to refining tools and strategies that support both students and instructors in improving communication skills in engineering.