Empowering Teaching Assistants in Challenge-based Learning

Project introduction and background information

Challenge-based learning (CBL) has emerged as an increasingly popular pedagogical approach in engineering education, demonstrating potential for developing students' disciplinary and transversal competencies. However, implementing CBL presents significant challenges for educators, including designing authentic open-ended challenges, scaffolding interdisciplinary collaboration, developing appropriate assessment methods, and coordinating with external stakeholders and multidisciplinary teaching teams. These complexities are amplified in large-scale CBL courses where students possess diverse prior knowledge and backgrounds. To address these challenges, many faculties have integrated teaching assistants (TAs) into CBL courses to provide individualized student support. Yet TAs, who are often students themselves, face dual challenges: they encounter similar facilitation difficulties as instructors while simultaneously navigating their unique position between faculty and student teams.  

Objective and expected outcomes

This research aims to clarify the roles and responsibilities in challenge-based learning courses, to explore TAs' experiences in challenge-based learning course in engineering education, to enhance existing training programs to support their professional and personal development, and to establish evidence-based design principles for TA training programs tailored to CBL contexts. To achieve the aim, the research will pursue the following specific objectives:

·        To identify the roles and responsibilities of TAs who work in CBL courses

·        To identify the essential knowledge and competencies required for TAs to effectively facilitate student teams in CBL courses

·        To investigate the gap between current TA training programs and the practical demands of supporting student teams in CBL courses.

·        To design an intervention that enhances TAs’ ability to work with student teams in CBL courses.

·        To assess the intervention in improving TAs’ knowledge and competencies for facilitating challenge-based learning.

·        To propose evidence-based design principles for developing TA training programs tailored to CBL courses.

This research will offer both theoretical and practical contributions. Theoretically, it will clarify TA roles in CBL contexts, identify essential pedagogical and transversal competencies to support TAs’ lifelong learning and professional development, and establish robust, tested design principles for TA training program development. Practically, it will deliver an educational intervention that supports TAs in fulfilling their responsibilities in CBL courses, serving as an example for training TAs in other student-centered, real-world, and interdisciplinary educational environments.