2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This research paper proposes and evaluates a TA training program aimed at developing teaching assistants’ use of narratives to support students’ intuitive understanding of the problem-solving process.
Teaching assistants (TAs) are essential to support growing engineering programs. In particular, many students interact with TAs during office hours to review problem solutions. Yet, many trainings do not focus on communicating these solutions to students well. In our university's required engineering TA training program, we taught a workshop to help TAs develop skills to help students learn the problem-solving process. We present a framework that supports TAs' explanations in office hours to find common ground with the student, show the student where to start, and normalize trying multiple approaches. We offer several examples of how to break solution steps down for students with varying levels of understanding and use these examples to put TAs back in a novice role. This training was given four times over two years to approximately 1000 students. We evaluate its impact with survey responses and an analysis of student activities for improvement throughout the training. Before and after our training , we ask TAs to write an explanation of a solution as they would share with a student. At the start of the training, few students considered the current level of student understanding. However, some do use parts of our framework without the training. After our training, we see that all students were able to improve their explanation and were able to use parts of the framework effectively. We find that TAs enjoyed the training and thought they could apply it to their various engineering courses. Future work will focus on developing training for specific majors and analyzing the longitudinal impacts of the training.