2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Motivation
This theory paper takes a deeper look into the roles of teaching assistants (TAs). The researchers direct and coordinate the first-year engineering program at a midsize private university in the Midwest, where approximately 25% of the student population studies engineering. All engineering students at the university take a specific sequence of first-year classes, which are administered with the aid of a team of 25 undergraduate TAs. In our experience, these TAs go on to become student leaders and successful engineering professionals after graduation. However, has the research previously examined the impacts of these experiences and how we can best set up TAs to realize this impact?

Background
TAs play a crucial role in the engineering classroom, helping guide students through the challenges and rigors of classwork. However, TAs are often understudied themselves, as we frequently focus on the students who are in the classroom as learners. As TAs are often students themselves, they too are impacted by the experiences of being a TA. Just like any person, TAs both form and are formed by the learning environment.
The impact of a TA experience is surely affected by the previous teaching and learning experiences of TAs. However, TAs normally get no formal training on teaching and learning prior to becoming a TA. Just like any other position, in order to be maximally effective in their role as a TA, they should have some sort of “new hire” training or apprenticeship that helps them learn about best practices in the classroom. How this training looks, however, can vary widely.
This paper aims to look at what the literature has found previously about these questions by aiming to answer the following questions: (1) What methods for developing and training teaching assistants in engineering and STEM classrooms are documented in the literature, and what evidence exists regarding their impacts on teaching and learning? (2) What impacts of undergraduate teaching assistants in engineering and STEM classrooms are reported in the literature, both on student learning outcomes and on the teaching assistants’ own development?

Methods
To this this analysis we started with a literature review and then used thematic analysis on the resulting paper sets. Using several databases, including Google Scholar, EBSCO, and Engineering Village, a series of searches were conducted to find literature about teaching assistants with respect to two main topics: (1) teaching assistant development and training, and (2) the impact or influence of the role of teaching assistants. Both topic searches were limited to include data from the past fifteen years. The search strings included synonymous for teaching assistants, which include but are not limited to TA, peer assistant, learning assistant, UGTA, and teacher’s aide. A specific focus in these searches was teaching assistants in engineering and STEM fields. Articles were selected based on their clear applicability to the research questions, accessibility, and overlap across databases and through related works. For the first research question, a total of 21 papers were found about the training and development of TAs in engineering and STEM classrooms, and each paper was analyzed to understand the methods and ideology behind certain TA training programs and the intended outcomes of said training programs to provide insight on how TAs are being developed for their role. For the second question, a total of 22 papers were found about the impact of teaching assistants in undergraduate engineering and STEM classrooms, and each paper was analyzed to understand what outcomes the roles of teaching assistants in STEM programs cause or affect.

Results
The analysis will result in a series of themes for both how TAs are trained and readied for their roles in engineering and STEM programs, as well as a series of themes showcasing how the unique role of a TA supports an undergraduate engineering student’s success both inside and outside the classroom by assisting with both their coursework and personal well-being. We anticipate seeing a range of proposed approaches to TA training, various results that show the benefits of intentional training programs, and a common understanding across papers that there is something lacking in the formal training TAs receive. Additionally, how the experiences an undergraduate engineering student has as a teaching assistant promote their individual academic and professional achievement. Overall, we expect the findings will reveal commonalities in TA training programs within engineering/STEM classrooms, while also illustrating how both the TAs’ own development and the students' learning are impacted within these spaces.