Longitudinal Development Of Teaching Assistants‘ Teaching Ability in a Mandatory Training Course

Abstract

Teaching assistants (TA) are vital to higher education (Park, 2004; Santandreu Calonge et al, 2013; Parker et al, 2015). As many TAs are assigned duties with little prior experience, formal training of teaching skills is essential (Blouin & Moss, 2015). For practical teaching, microteaching sessions serve as a valuable substitute to in-class observations (Dar, 2015). The studied training program (for graduate-student TAs) is facilitated by a teaching centre at a research-intensive university in Hong Kong (class size about 20, training about 600 TAs a year, 24 face-to-face hours). Participants of the program facilitate two in-class teaching demonstrations, which occur mid-course (five minutes) and end of the course (ten minutes). Training includes active learning facilitation (Ueckert & Gess-Newsome, 2008) and Outcomes-Based Teaching and Learning (Biggs & Tang, 2011). Areas of improvement are identified using Kolb’s reflective cycle (1976) by the participant in the first demonstration and changes are identified and implemented in the second demonstration. In addition to written feedback, participants receive a grade only in the form of “pass” or “fail”. To facilitate development based on quantitative feedback, an analytic 4-point (0,1,2,3) rubric was designed with descriptors in five areas: Learning Outcomes (LO), Active Learning Strategies (ALS), Supporting Materials (SM), Explanations (EXP) and Presentation Skills (PS) using previous feedback written for students. The study investigated the teaching demonstrations of 40 participants enrolled in Sept-Dec 2016 (32 STEM TAs, and 8 TAs from other faculties). Approval was granted by the university ethics committee. Inter-rater reliability (weighted Cohen’s Kappa) between two graders over all (40 mid-course, 40 end-of-course) presentations was .93 indicating excellent (>.75; Fleiss, Levin & Paik, 2013) agreement. Scores increased (out of 15) from the first (Mean=8.27, SD=1.71) to the second (Mean=10.38, SD=1.59; t(39)=8.70, p.50/.80; Cohen, 1992) in LO, SM, EXP, PSand large (d>.80) in ALS. Observed development suggests that training teaching skills coupled with microteaching in these initial stages can provide an increase in overall teaching ability. Most participants had little exposure to LO and ALS previously. Increases in LO and ALS can be partly attributed to their required implementation in the second demonstration. Increases inPS and SM are likely a result of training from the class or implementation of individualized feedback from the trainer. The authors suggest using Kolb’s reflective cycle as participants are readily able to identify and make changes with some guidance. Selfreported data on self-efficacy and other areas would provide a more complete narrative of the TA training experience. Latent Profile Analysis may help to describe how training impacts students with differing experience, and faculty designations. Further investigation towards in-class service teaching would inform the sustainability of developments. These preliminary results indicate that TAs improved largely between the two teaching demonstrations. Results should be treated with caution as the sample size is small and the improvement is dependent on specific areas of need for participants of this program. Studies that further test the validity of these results are warranted.