With the rapid increase of students majoring in computing, undergraduate teaching assistants (UTAs) or have become a key resource for managing large courses and assisting students. Understanding the pedagogical practices employed by UTAs is essential for improving tutoring quality and meeting student learning needs. Our research aims to explore the pedagogical practices UTAs use during office hours and examine how they implement these strategies. To investigate these practices, we conducted an ethnographic study with seven UTAs, observing them for 37.5 hours in 50 tutoring sessions during office hours and documenting their interactions with students. Our study revealed that UTAs employ six pedagogical practices: asking open-ended questions, direct manipulation, prompting, referencing resources, explaining, and expressing affect. Tutors tended to rely on explanations, questions, and references to resources to support concept understanding, and hands-on directing and expressions of affect for debugging. Our work offers valuable insight into effective tutoring strategies that can benefit novice and experienced tutors.
Thu 19 FebDisplayed time zone: Central Time (US & Canada) change
10:40 - 12:00 | TAs and TutorsPapers at Meeting Room 102 Chair(s): Taha Hassan Alabama Center for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence | ||
10:40 20mTalk | A Replication Study on Student Expectations on CS Tutors: Understanding Roles and Labors of Tutors Papers Yubin Kim UC Irvine, Computer Science Department, Edward X. Chen University of California, Irvine, Sofia Caston Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Jeffrey Fairbanks University of California, Irvine, Sophie Russ California Polytechnic State University, Jett Spitzer University of California, Irvine, Duong Hoang Thuy Vu University of California, Irvine, James Andro-Vasko University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Wolfgang Bein University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Daniel Frishberg California Polytechnic State University, Stephen Tsung-Han Sher Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Michael Shindler University of California, Irvine | ||
11:00 20mTalk | Behind the Scenes of Delivering a Large Computing Course: The Experience of a TA Managing Logistics Papers | ||
11:20 20mTalk | Exploring Undergraduate Computing Tutors’ Pedagogical Practices Papers Esse Ciego University of Florida, Skyler Steiert University of Florida, Amanpreet Kapoor University of Florida, USA | ||
11:40 20mTalk | How Shared Gender Identity with Teaching Assistants Relates to Student Outcomes in an Undergraduate Algorithms Course Papers Alex Chao University of California, San Diego, Janet Jiang Duke University, Kristin Stephens-Martinez Duke University | ||