Abstract:

Have you ever thought of a teaching assistant (TA) as a juggler trying to keep several balls in the air at once? This is a valid comparison. They often combine the role of starting researcher, first-time teacher, employee and student. As they tend to spend a lot of time on class preparation as new teachers, it is a difficult task to balance these different – yet related - roles. For example, research shows that teaching helps them develop research skills such as generating testable hypotheses, planning out an experimental design, etc. Teaching can therefore contribute to professional and personal development, thus be a real added value.

To make maximum use of this learning opportunity, TAs should be able to participate in a training programme. The Science, Engineering and Technology Group (SET Group) of the University of Leuven wants to strengthen such training programmes and therefore launched the STEAM-TA project. More details on the set-up of this project can be found in Loix and Peeters (2021)1. In that paper, we also advocated that a training programme should ideally contain a mix of cross-curricular and course-specific topics, to be as relevant as possible. Integrating this course-specific content generates a lot of work and is organizationally challenging, and for these reasons, it is often omitted.

In this paper, we explore different ways to include this course-specific content. Each STEAM domain has its typical concepts that students struggle with year after year, e.g. Newton's second law, differential equations, chemical reaction mechanisms, bending moments, heat transfer, etc. Research has repeatedly shown that such issues can remain under the radar while teaching. They are also particularly persistent. Even after completing the course, students may still be carrying around the same misconceptions. This is why it is important to make TAs more aware and provide them with strategies to correct these misconceptions. We organised five pilot projects, spread across the five faculties of the SET Group. For each pilot, we worked together with an expert in the field, who dug into the literature or drew on his or her own experience to pinpoint some common misconceptions. We worked on five topics, ensuring that the conclusions for each pilot were transferable to other fields. E.g. chemical reaction mechanisms are addressed in several programmes of the faculty of Science, but also in programmes of the faculties of Engineering Technology and Bioengineering Science. From these pilot projects, we compiled practical tips, a list of educational literature journals, a roadmap for small didactic teams to get started and a roadmap for organizing sessions for larger didactic teams. Hereby, we aim to lower the threshold for faculty members, TAs or teaching staff to also focus on course-specific content.

References:
[1] S. Loix and I. Peeters, “Full STEAM ahead: training teaching assistants in Science and Technology”, Proceedings of the EDULEARN21 Conference, pp. 2143-2148, 2021.

Keywords:

Teaching Assistant, training programme, STEM, Higher Education.