Effects of Graduate TA Support on Undergraduate Psychological Experiences and Academic Behaviors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
College graduates have opportunities to earn better wages, job security, and health outcomes compared to those without a degree, though over a quarter of college students will drop-out at some point due to financial, academic, and psychological difficulties. Student persistence in college is determined not just by prior experience and grit, but also by academic self-perceptions such as a sense of social belonging and self-efficacy. For women in STEM courses where they have historically encountered an unwelcoming environment, academic self-perceptions are particularly sensitive to environmental cues. Through observational, longitudinal, and experimental modes, the following studies aimed to determine how graduate TAs provide support in STEM-type courses, how this support may affect academic self-perceptions, performance, and persistence outcomes, and if effects depend on undergraduate student gender. In Study 1, TA were filmed while teaching introductory STEM courses for the purposes of coding their supportive behaviors, and student self-report measures of academic self-perceptions were collected near the beginning and ending of a single semester in these courses. Results showed that TAs most often provide support in the form of emotional nurturing and pedagogical scaffolding, and that higher perceived TA support over the course of a semester is related to a higher sense of social belonging in STEM-type labs and recitations regardless of student gender. Study 2 manipulated type of enacted TA support in a simulated STEM classroom and found that nurturing support particularly increased student task persistence across gender, while support in the form of pedagogical scaffolding resulted in higher exam scores across gender. Findings demonstrate that graduate student TAs have the power to help shape positive experiences of undergraduate students, these benefits do not depend on student gender, and the types of supportive behavior that TAs naturally engage are those that most help undergraduate student performance and persistence.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".