What Help Do Students Seek in TA Office Hours?

Yan-yan, Ren; Krishnamurthi, Shriram; Fisler, Kathi

doi:10.1145/3291279.3339418

Cited by 23 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Also, both semester's average interaction time is shorter than the range suggested by Smith et al [16]. And both semesters also have a lower percentage of students participating than the 90% in Ren et al [13]'s research. This may suggest that institutional context and class culture impacts office hours help seeking.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 63%

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Who Uses Office Hours?

Gao

Heckman

Lynch

2022

Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

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In Computer Science (CS) education, instructors use office hours for one-on-one help-seeking. Prior work has shown that traditional in-person office hours may be underutilized. In response many instructors are adding or transitioning to virtual office hours. Our research focuses on comparing in-person and online office hours to investigate differences between performance, interaction time, and the characteristics of the students who utilize in-person and virtual office hours. We analyze a rich dataset covering two semesters of a CS2 course which used in-person office hours in Fall 2019 and virtual office hours in Fall 2020. Our data covers students' use of office hours, the nature of their questions, and the time spent receiving help as well as demographic and attitude data. Our results show no relationship between student's attendance in office hours and class performance. However we found that female students attended office hours more frequently, as did students with a fixed mindset in computing, and those with weaker skills in transferring theory to practice. We also found that students with low confidence in or low enjoyment toward CS were more active in virtual office hours. Finally, we observed a significant correlation between students attending virtual office hours and an increased interest in CS study; while students attending in-person office hours tend to show an increase in their growth mindset. CCS CONCEPTS• Applied computing → Interactive learning environments; • Social and professional topics → Computer science education; User characteristics.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 63%

“…Interaction times ranged from 17 to 32 minutes [16]. Ren et al [13] found that 90% of students in the CS1 course they studied attended office hours. Office hours utilization, wait times, and interaction times can vary by semester and institution, but differences between in-person and virtual have not yet been studied to our knowledge.…”

Section: Rq1: Interactionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Who Uses Office Hours?

Gao

Heckman

Lynch

2022

Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

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“…Programs for employing students as TAs have been reported as successful at multiple institutions [6,10,21]. It has been argued that TAs make it more comfortable for the students since students can experience it as easier to ask other students for help rather than senior professors [9,28]. The TAs are typically closer in academic age to the students and were themselves learners in the subject more recently [28], and TAs have also been shown to view themselves as both a friend and a teacher to their students [30,32].…”

Section: Related Research and Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It has been argued that TAs make it more comfortable for the students since students can experience it as easier to ask other students for help rather than senior professors [9,28]. The TAs are typically closer in academic age to the students and were themselves learners in the subject more recently [28], and TAs have also been shown to view themselves as both a friend and a teacher to their students [30,32]. This could, however, lead to conflicts of interest arising when it comes to grading [30,32].…”

Section: Related Research and Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…TAs are typically undergraduate or graduate students who have previously enrolled in the same or a similar course, working parallel with their own studies [21]. The TAs' work tasks could differ between universities and courses, but could include conducting tutorials, tutoring students, and grading assignments [18,21,28,32]. Even though the TAs are responsible for many of the interactions with students, previous studies have shown that the TAs could be poorly prepared and offering TA training has been suggested as a way to assist the TAs with their professional development [13,23,32].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Training Teaching Assistants in Assessment of Lab Assignments in Computer Science at a Swedish University

Riese

Kann

2022

NJSTEME

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Teaching assistants (TAs), students who assist the faculty, are widely used in computer science (CS) courses. Previous studies have, however, shown that TAs could be poorly prepared and need training. Particularly, an interview study has shown that one of the areas where the TAs experience uncertainty is when assessing students’ oral presentations of their lab assignments. Based on that result and by interviewing course coordinators, we have developed and offered training workshops about assessment in CS. We invited our TAs in the introductory CS courses to participate on a voluntary basis. By distributing pre-workshop surveys at the beginning of each semester, and post-workshop surveys at the end of the semesters, to both workshop attendees (50) and non-attendees (44), we studied how the TAs conducted the assessments and what impact the training workshop had on their self-reported practice. Both surveys had 11 identical statements that the TAs were asked to rate on a 7-point Likert scale. We also conducted interviews with four workshop attendees and three non-attendees. The results showed a significant difference between the two groups in the post-workshop survey: workshop attendees disagreed more with the statement “I try to assess students' understanding rather than the program”, which is more in line with the instructions given. In addition, when comparing pre- and post-workshop answers, the workshop attendees stated that they were less inclined to ask for help, experienced that the lab instructions were not detailed enough, and were more inclined to ask questions that convinced them that the students had written the program themselves. In the control group, no significant differences between pre- and post-tests were found.

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Teaching Assistants’ Experiences of Tutoring and Assessing in Computer Science Education

Riese

Kann

2020

2020 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)

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What Help Do Students Seek in TA Office Hours?

Cited by 23 publications

References 17 publications

Who Uses Office Hours?

Who Uses Office Hours?

Training Teaching Assistants in Assessment of Lab Assignments in Computer Science at a Swedish University

Teaching Assistants’ Experiences of Tutoring and Assessing in Computer Science Education

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