Challenges Faced by Teaching Assistants in Computer Science Education Across Europe

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216224%3A14330%2F21%3A00121376" target="_blank" >RIV/00216224:14330/21:00121376 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3430665.3456304" target="_blank" >http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3430665.3456304</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3430665.3456304" target="_blank" >10.1145/3430665.3456304</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Challenges Faced by Teaching Assistants in Computer Science Education Across Europe

Original language description

Teaching assistants (TAs) are heavily used in computer science courses as a way to handle high enrollment and still being able to offer students individual tutoring and detailed assessments. TAs are themselves students who take on this additional role in parallel with their own studies at the same institution. Previous research has shown that being a TA can be challenging but has mainly been conducted on TAs from a single institution or within a single course. This paper offers a multi-institutional, multi-national perspective of challenges that TAs in computer science face. This has been done by conducting a thematic analysis of 180 reflective essays written by TAs from three institutions across Europe. The thematic analysis resulted in five main challenges: becoming a professional TA, student focused challenges, assessment, defining and using best practice, and threats to best practice. In addition, these challenges were all identified within the essays from all three institutions, indicating that the identified challenges are not particularly context-dependent. Based on these findings, we also outline implications for educators involved in TA training and coordinators of computer science courses with TAs.

Czech name

—

Czech description

—

Type

D - Article in proceedings

CEP classification

—

OECD FORD branch

10201 - Computer sciences, information science, bioinformathics (hardware development to be 2.2, social aspect to be 5.8)

Project

—

Continuities

S - Specificky vyzkum na vysokych skolach

Publication year

2021

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Article name in the collection

Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE ’21)

ISBN

9781450382144

ISSN

1942-647X

e-ISSN

—

Number of pages

7

Pages from-to

547-553

Publisher name

ACM

Place of publication

Paderborn, Germany

Event location

Paderborn, Germany

Event date

Jun 26, 2021

Type of event by nationality

WRD - Celosvětová akce

UT code for WoS article

—