An Initial Exploration: Perspectives from Graduate Teaching Assistants

Final Paper pdf 350KB

Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) play a critical role in many undergraduate STEM courses. They serve in supporting capacities, but they are also often used as instructors of record. It is essential that GTAs are trained on the technical content needed for these positions; however, it is also crucial that they are well versed in pedagogy so that they can effectively teach their students the technical content. Through this Work in Progress paper, we will briefly describe a course that serves as the inspiration of this work and provide initial results from a survey designed to measure GTAs’ self-regulation, self-efficacy, and cultural sensitivity. The information we have collected will allow us to improve opportunities for GTA development.

Through this Work in Progress paper we will describe a course that is required of our GTAs that was designed based on general GTA and teacher preparation literature. Now that the course has been successfully piloted for GTAs teachings in different first-year engineering courses, we are interested in expanding the objectives and impact of this course to other settings. Specifically, our research question is: How do GTAs develop their pedagogical epistemologies? To begin to answer our research question, we have collected pilot data from a survey which will also be presented in this paper. The survey aims to capture GTAs’ self-regulation, self-efficacy, and cultural sensitivity.

The information we have collected will allow us to improve opportunities for GTA development. As this work progresses, we plan to develop resources that can be used by a variety of institutions to better support GTAs in their pedagogical development. While the implementation of this training will cater to STEM fields specifically, we believe that the results will encourage its integration into existing resources to complement the range of resources currently provided by teaching and learning centers and departments.

Author(s):

Rachel Kajfez    
Engineering Education
The Ohio State University
United States

Courtney Smith-Orr    
Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
United States

Rachel McCord    
Engineering Fundamentals Program
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
United States