Maximising university education through improved teaching assistant training

Teaching assistants (TAs) play a key role in helping undergraduate university students with their studies. However, there is a lack of formal training provided to TAs and their role is not always clearly defined. Project Associate Professor Mio Tsubakimoto, University of Tokyo, Japan, is seeking to make improvements to this situation by enhancing the education provided to TAs and, in the process, improving university education. FIrst, Tsubakimoto set out to understand the role played by TAs from the perspective of students, teachers and the TAs themselves and build a picture of the set of skills and techniques that make a good TA. To do this she qualitatively and quantitatively studied how the different classes and lectures that make up First Year Seminars (FYS) were taught, as well as surveying TAs, with a view to implementing improvements to TA training. These investigations led to the development and distribution of a guide for TA training and content that incorporates active learning. Following two years of training TAs using the guide, Tsubakimoto repeated the surveys in order to assess the ways in which the implementation of the guide had enhanced TA performance. She found that the presence of trained TAs led to improved student and faculty performance. The research underlined the benefits of the presence of trained TAs in the classroom for university learning, both for the students and for the TAs themselves, enabling them to reach their full potential.