Graduate Teaching Assistants Views of Their Own Teaching Practice Competence

Graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) serve a variety of roles in engineering classrooms including primary instructor, lab supervisor, grader, classroom assistant, and more. Although responsibilities vary, the importance of GTAs to undergraduate students’ learning experiences is often quite high as these roles put GTAs in direct and extended contact with students. Therefore, it is important that GTAs be appropriately trained for their classroom roles. Developing and improving such training in meaningful ways requires understanding GTA experiences, in their own words and from their own perspectives. To date, little is known about GTA experiences in engineering from the viewpoint of the GTAs. Even less is known specifically about GTA views on their own ability beliefs, and literature shows that such competence beliefs are particularly important for positive teaching experiences. Therefore, this study intentionally examines the competence beliefs of GTAs involved in first-year engineering programs (FYEPs) with regard to their knowledge and application of teaching practices or pedagogy. For this research, five interviews were conducted and analyzed with GTAs representing five different institutions. Based on the analysis, GTAs report little training specifically on teaching practices from their FYEPs, but they do indicate that training is provided through other venues at the university which helps them improve their teaching.