Knowledge Bank

Technical communication, any form of communication that must effectively convey specialized knowledge such as lab reports, product proposals, etc. is a large part of many engineers' lives. It is important for engineering students to learn technical communication skills because of the influence it may have on their future careers. At Ohio State, technical communication skills are taught in the Fundamentals of Engineering courses through technical writing assignments such as lab reports. Students can track their mastery of technical communication using their scores on these assignments and the written feedback left on their work by Undergraduate Teaching Assistants (UTAs). Despite the positive impact written feedback has on student learning, the quality of and experiences that inform UTA written feedback are largely unknown. This study aims to be the first step in improving UTA written feedback methods. A group of UTAs, Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs), and faculty were given a student writing sample to score and leave written feedback on. Their comments were broken into individual ideas and then coded using two different coding methods, one focusing on the content of the ideas, and the other focusing on the purpose. The two coding methods were synthesized from literature that discussed categorizing feedback on student work. From these results, trends and observations comparing the UTAs and Experts (GTAs and Faculty) and described alongside observations of UTAs alone. In general, UTAs and Experts do not share common written feedback methods. Future work will explore the experiences that inform UTA written feedback methods through a focus group with UTA participants from this study.