Graduate Teaching Assistants’ Perception of Student Difficulties and Use in Teaching
Date
2024-06-01
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
International Journal of Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education
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.
Description
This article was originally published in International Journal of Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40753-024-00239-1. © The Author(s) 2024
Keywords
graduate teaching assistant, calculus, noticing, teaching, students' errors
Citation
Park, J., Rizzolo, D. Graduate Teaching Assistants’ Perception of Student Difficulties and Use in Teaching. Int. J. Res. Undergrad. Math. Ed. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40753-024-00239-1