Impact of the Lead TA Program on the Perceived Disciplinary Instructional Competence of Graduate Teaching Assistants
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Graduate teaching assistant (GTA) training initiatives such as the Lead TA Program seek to enhance the instructional competence of GTAs at a disciplinary level. This paper outlines the results of a mixed-method study conducted to evaluate the perceived impact of the Lead TA Program on GTAs during a two-year pilot implementation stage at a large, research-intensive Canadian university. As a result of participating in programming offered by Lead TAs, GTAs reported overall gains in their confidence as an instructor as well as increased disciplinary instructional competence. GTAs’ perceived benefits in relation to disciplinary instructional competence included: (a) increased knowledge of the TA role in the context of their department, (b) gains in pedagogical content knowledge, and (c) increased classroom management skills when facilitating disciplinary tasks or discussions. The study points to the potential for the Lead TA Program to enhance the general, domain, and topic-specific pedagogical content knowledge of GTAs. Unique challenges of implementing discipline-specific programming are addressed and recommendations are offered for establishing similar programs at other universities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".