Graduate Teaching Assistants’ Perception of Student Difficulties and Use in Teaching

Abstract

Given the important role graduate teaching assistants (TAs) play in undergraduate students’ learning, we investigated what TAs identified as students’ difficulties from students’ written work, their plans to address them, and implementation of their plans in class. Since the difficulties that TAs identified in general matched errors that students made, we analyzed what TAs identified in terms of literature on error handling. We examined levels of specific details of students’ work involved in TAs’ identifying, planning, and teaching. Our results show that (a) TAs often did not identify the most frequent errors students made, which reflected well-documented difficulties from the literature, (b) the errors TAs identified were mainly procedural in nature, (c) specific details of students’ work were mainly included in procedural errors, and (d) the level of specificity of students’ work was generally consistent but showed some drops when going from identifying to planning, then to teaching. Our results highlight interesting questions for future research and could be used as resources to design professional development that helps TAs use students’ errors in teaching to promote students’ learning.