Teaching assistants' experiences navigating first-year statistics
Article
| Article Title | Teaching assistants' experiences navigating first-year statistics |
|---|---|
| ERA Journal ID | 20498 |
| Article Category | Article |
| Authors | Dunn, Peter K. and Axelsen, Taryn |
| Journal Title | International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology |
| Number of Pages | 30 |
| Year | 2025 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis |
| Place of Publication | United Kingdom |
| ISSN | 0020-739X |
| 1464-5211 | |
| Digital Object Identifier (DOI) | https://doi.org/10.1080/0020739X.2025.2563125 |
| Web Address (URL) | https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0020739X.2025.2563125 |
| Abstract | Teaching assistants (TAs) are often used in higher education to deliver content in large courses, but TAs’ experiences are poorly understood. For some large courses, such as foundation statistics, different universities have different profiles from which to draw the TAs, depending on whether the universities offer graduate programmes aligned with those courses. In this paper, we compare the experiences of TAs who teach foundation statistics at two universities; some TAs have a strong discipline-specific and online-teaching background, while other have less background in content and online teaching but a strong teaching background. The TAs' experiences are compared for teaching specific topics, and for face-to-face and online teaching. While we found different experiences and challenges for the different TAs, TAs at both universities reported online teaching as more challenging and less effective than face-to-face teaching. Training or mentoring TAs is suggested, but in different areas for the different TAs (though all would benefit from assistance with online teaching). The TAs state that mentoring from experienced TAs is effective for navigating the teaching of first-year statistics. However, challenges with training and mentoring TAs are identified. |
| Keywords | Online teaching; teaching preparation; mentoring |
| Contains Sensitive Content | Does not contain sensitive content |
| ANZSRC Field of Research 2020 | 490599. Statistics not elsewhere classified |
| Byline Affiliations | University of the Sunshine Coast |
| School of Mathematics, Physics and Computing |
https://research.usq.edu.au/item/10070w/teaching-assistants-experiences-navigating-first-year-statistics
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| Teaching assistants experiences navigating first-year statistics.pdf | ||
| License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 | ||
| File access level: Anyone | ||
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