Browsing by Author "Hidalgo, Ximena"

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    The Well-being Teaching Assistant: A Proactive Approach to Caring for Students with Academic and Personal Difficulties in Massive Courses
    (American Society for Engineering Education, 2023) Baier, Jorge A.; Hilliger, Isabel; Hidalgo, Ximena; Piña, Matías; Astudillo, Gabriel
    © American Society for Engineering Education, 2023.Since the covid pandemic, some higher education institutions have promoted a flexible evaluation approach for students who face a variety of problems. Instructors willing to implement such flexibilizations face an important challenge: making themselves aware of students going through hard times. This evidence-based practice paper presents an overview and a preliminary evaluation of the well-being teaching assistant (WTA), an approach to facilitating communication, suggesting and documenting flexibilizations, and providing support for students going through difficult times in high-enrolment courses. WTAs are regular members of the teaching assistant staff, but they use an early warning system to identify potential students at risk of failure, initiate communication using supportive language, and take action by suggesting flexibilization or providing academic support for students facing challenges. WTAs have been incorporated into 27 courses at a large school of engineering in Latin America, during 2022, and have been positively evaluated by students. One of the main current challenges of the approach is scalability.
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    What is care in engineering teaching?
    (2020) Baier, Jorge; Hilliger, Isabel; Hidalgo, Ximena; Melian, Constanza
    The concept of care in teaching has been associated with the development of supportive, personalized relationships between teachers and students, and with the development of an emotionally safe environment inside and outside the classroom. Care in teaching has been found to have an impact on the emotional health and on the intrinsic motivation of students. Thus, arguably it also has a positive impact on learning experience. Existing literature does not identify what attitudes and practices can be implemented in schools of engineering to promote effective care in teaching. This paper describes the progress of an ongoing research currently carried out at a large engineering school in Chile. The investigation has two main objectives. First, to understand what does it mean to care in teaching; second, to understand what is the influence that caring teaching has on the students' learning experience. © American Society for Engineering Education 2020