Effects of Training Programs for University Teaching Assistants: A Review of Empirical Research

Abstract

As the adequacy of training for college teachers has been criticized more and more widely during the past fifteen or twenty years, countless pre-service orientation programs, in-service workshops, seminars, apprenticeship programs, intern programs, extern programs, and the like have been developed. During roughly the same period, the recruitment of teaching assistants (TAs) has been extended-for both pedagogical and budgetary reasons-to the undergraduate level; the use of undergraduate TAs may have helped to heighten the presumed need for training as well as to increase the number and diversity of training programs pressed into service. The recent development of TA training programs seems commendable, but it is surprising to note the limited extent of empirical research on the effects of such training. Numerous descriptions of innovative training programs have been published, and a number of catalogs for teacher training materials are available [1, 28, 29, 31, 44]. Yet relatively few empirical studies have included student performance and satisfaction measures to assess the effectiveness of TA training programs. Most published reports either failed to provide evaluative data or merely presented