Exploring factors that impact physical science doctoral student role identities through a multiple case study approach

Abstract

We explore how physical science doctoral students navigate their role identities throughout their graduate programme. Physical science doctoral students take on many academic roles in addition to the role of scientist, including researcher, educator, and student. When social expectations of roles become internalized, they become role identities. We examined doctoral students' academic role identities as a complex system to unpack factors that constrain the behavior and define the nature of doctoral students' academic role identities. This multiple case study used open-ended reflective questions and narrative-style interviews with eight physical science doctoral students to explore how physical science doctoral students navigate their role identities throughout their graduate programme and the factors that may influence these identities.Responses to the reflective questions and narrative interview transcripts were qualitatively coded and salient themes are drawn through cross-case analysis. Themes were compared across data sources to further validate the findings. Participants ascribed the most value to researcher and student identities and the least value to an educator identity. Time spent in a role, institutional recognition,

Mathematics Graduate Students’ Teacher Identity Development: Examining Roles Within the Teaching Assistant Position

“…al, 2013;Solari & Ortega, 2020), but we offer new insights through a closer examination of how TAs made sense of and negotiated meaning with others and the resulting roles they took up (See Table 2). Extending beyond scholars who have examined specific roles that graduate students take up, such as being a teacher (e.g., Speer et al, 2010) or mentor (e.g., Brown & Sheerin, 2018;McAlister et al, 2022), our study offers a more comprehensive set of roles and dimensions within the TA position and how these roles interact with other positions in a mathematics department, yielding a possible conceptual foundation for continued examination of mathematics graduate students' teacher identity development. Beauchamp and Thomas (2009) wrote that identity "is shaped and reshaped in interactions with others in a professional context" (p. 178), and we found that the instructional context of Math A and the different social relationships led TAs to assume a wide range of role identities, echoing the notion that teachers' identities are multidimensional (e.g., Berger & Lê Van, 2019;Clarke et al, 2013).…”

“…Features of this role encompass practices related to instruction, including preparing and delivering lectures, facilitating discussions, and assessing student performance (e.g., Lee, 2019;Mesa et al, 2014;Speer et al, 2010). Other TA roles include: connecting and building community with and amongst their undergraduate students (Camarao & Din, 2023;Olarte et al, 2021), mentoring (Brown & Sheerin, 2018;McAlister et al, 2022), and supporting peers and undergraduate students (Bowles et al, 2018;Staton & Darling, 1989;Syrnyk, 2018). For example, Brown and Sheerin (2018) described the ways that graduate students enacted different forms of mentorship, ranging from informal mentoring with no set goals or timelines to more formal mentoring.…”

“…For example, Brown and Sheerin (2018) described the ways that graduate students enacted different forms of mentorship, ranging from informal mentoring with no set goals or timelines to more formal mentoring. Additionally, graduate students engage in the role of supporters through such practices as sharing information and providing emotional support to fellow graduate students (McAlister et al, 2022;Staton & Darling, 1989) and supporting undergraduate students by offering socioemotional support and attending to their students' diverse needs (Bowles et al, 2018;Syrnyk, 2018).…”

“…The second area of roles extend beyond teaching or specific practices. First, graduate students take up roles as learners beyond their graduate coursework (e.g., Kajfez & McNair, 2014;McAlister et al, 2022). Sprague and Nyquist (1989) described early graduate TA positions as "senior learners," or TAs who "tend to identify more with the students in their classes than with the instructors they are assisting" (p. 44).…”