Conference Session

Undergraduate Peer Educators: Mentoring, Observing, Learning

Collection

2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

YunJeong Chang, University of Virginia; Rider W. Foley, University of Virginia

Tagged Topics

ASEE Board of Directors

Tagged Divisions

Liberal Education/Engineering & Society

, are two-fold. First, the UTAs might serve as aspirational peers that are more relatable and approachableto the first-year engineering students. With this intention in mind, the UTAs typically circulatedthrough the classroom in the second half of the semester during “work days” when the first-yearstudents were working on the provisional patent application assignment. Further, UTAs offeredoffice hours and selected a location in the student work area. Secondarily, the UTAs took fieldnotes following semi-structured observational guidelines that described the interactions andactivities in the discussion section. The UTAs met with the research team to review the fieldnotes and deliberate on the activities every other week for the duration of the

Conference Session

Undergraduate Peer Educators: Mentoring, Observing, Learning

Collection

2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Vanessa Svihla, University of New Mexico; Catherine Anne Hubka, University of New Mexico; Eva Chi, University of New Mexico

Tagged Topics

ASEE Board of Directors

Tagged Divisions

Liberal Education/Engineering & Society

specific genres is considering audience [25];often, students think only of the teacher or instructor as the audience because they have not beenasked to write for an authentic audience in schools settings. This is especially true for technicalreport writing in engineering laboratory assignments, where students tend to not perceivesituations in which an audience might exist [26]. Instead, they tend to write as a means to justifythat they followed their laboratory and technical processes accurately, with an audience (i.e., aninstructor) in mind who has sufficient expertise to judge this.Although a common place to focus on writing in engineering has been short and long reports inlaboratory courses [20, 23, 26-30], others argue for a broader