Expert TA Blog

A teaching assistant (TA) is an individual who assists a teacher with instructional responsibilities, and as many of you know, TAs are a big part of the college classroom. The duties of a TA can include research-based projects, but many spend the majority of their time on lab work and grading.

These educational helpers are hired to assist with various instructor functions as a means to supplement graduate expenses. However, since most TAs are heavily involved with their own graduate studies, their availability is often limited to a few hours each week.

The popularity of electronic homework in recent years has changed the role of TAs in college classrooms, giving them much more responsibility to work directly with students rather than using all of their weekly hours putting red ink onto papers.

Dr. Stephen Remillard is an associate professor of physics and the department chair at Hope College. He describes the evolution of the role of teaching assistants for their physics faculty, "Rather than using some or all of five hours per week to grade, they use all of their time to interact with students now.” The TAs at Hope College already had limited participation in learning sessions, but now they are leading the majority of the student study groups in the department. Dr. Remillard continued:

Students sign up for a TA-led study group with 10 to 15 other students. The group meets once per week to work through exercises intended to address common sticking points associated with that week's topic. Because there is no professor present, the TA learns how to lead groups of people through [various] learning exercises.

Many universities, like UNC Charlotte, provide valuable resources for their TAs as they learn how to teach and lead. UNC Charlotte’s “A Brief Survival Guide for New Graduate Teaching Assistants” is a great guide for their TAs with specific resources and planning materials ranging from planning what you’re going to teach to dealing with problem students.

Drexel University’s “The Effective Teaching Assistant” is also a valuable resource. It provides a full guide to preparing lectures and recommendations on being effective in the new position.  

As Drexel points out to its TAs:

Teaching assistants are expected to maintain the same standards of professional ethics as any member of the Drexel University faculty.  Always come to class on time and prepared to teach. You may have expected your duties to consist simply of research and grading, but find yourself with sole responsibility for one or more classes.

TAs are certainly more than just homework and lab graders now. Many will be able to include significant teaching responsibilities on their curriculum vitae, which can be an important deciding factor for future job applications.

This blog post is not meant to equip you with the complete knowledge to get started down the path to the flipped classroom—although we do plan on writing a “Getting started with the Flipped Classroom” primer in the near future, which will introduce an entire series on best practices for the flipped classroom. We simply want to state a case for experimenting with a few aspects of this new method and why recording one or two lectures to video is an effective way to try it.

So what are the Pros and Cons?

Cons

• Without feeling the need to present a detailed and exhaustive list here, let’s just say that it certainly is a lot of work. Making any change to a class can require a lot of time and effort, and recording, editing, storing, and posting videos will take time.
• Some instructors’ teaching styles are not conducive to a flipped classroom. If you are a fantastic lecturer and feel that your students connect with you well in person, flipping might not be for you.
• Similarly, some students’ learning styles might not match a flipped classroom if they respond well to personal instruction.

Pros         

• Flexibility. Class time becomes more flexible. If you can deliver some of the course material outside of class, you free up more time in class for anything that would help your students learn better. For example, if lectures were watched by students before class, you could spend more class time on problem-solving. (See an example of an Expert TA instructor experiencing this with her blended classroom.)
• In a live lecture, students cannot pause, rewind, or re-watch material. With a video, each student can watch the material at his or her own pace.
• The possibility of perfection. When you video a lecture, you have the opportunity to make it as perfect as you can, much more so than in a live lecture setting.
• Less future work. Rather than preparing for a perfect lecture every day, every semester, you can make a good video once, reducing your future workload.
• Better communication. In a lecture setting, many students are intimidated and don’t always ask their questions for fear of looking like they’re the only one who doesn’t understand. If you get the right communication lines established (forums, email, etc.), you can actually see increased questions and communication from your students.

Although making videos can be time-consuming up front, it’s probably easier than most professors realize. And, like most things, it’s something you get better at with practice. We plan to post a basic guide to recording video lectures in the near future, which will be complete with reviews of specific software that you could use, best tips on recording, and how to post them.

For now, consider the convenience factor associated with having a few lecture recordings. If you need to travel, you no longer have to cancel class. Students can view the lecture and then either do work outside of class or participate in group work sessions facilitated by a TA.

In many ways, having lecture recordings affords a lot more flexibility for instructors. Our suggestion? Try easing into the model with one or two recordings. You might find yourself on a path that you really like.

In 2015, the AP Physics Exam experienced significant changes. AP Physics B was split into two exams and two courses: AP Physics 1 and AP Physics 2. In addition, the amended approach emphasizes the processes of scientific inquiry and reasoning, experimental design and working symbolically. As shared in a previous Expert TA blog, the number of students who took the AP Physics exam doubled in 2015, but the percentage of students who scored a 3 or higher (and therefore received college credit) declined from 59.7% in 2014 to 39.2% in 2015. Examination of score distribution data from the College Board shows that the number one reason for the decline in passing scores in 2015 was lack of sufficient preparation for the free response questions.

Students are not getting enough practice with solving problems symbolically, which is a big part of the exam. In the free response section, test takers are asked to show all their work, and as stated in the course and exam description from The College Board, even correct answers may not receive full credit if supporting information is insufficient. This supporting information almost always includes fundamental symbolic relationships and equations. Preparation Material for the exams should not just require students to regularly deal with symbolic expressions, but should also continually reinforce the problem solving process. This gives students the opportunity to think about why a given equation is important within the context of a specific problem.

We believe that many homework platforms are not properly preparing students for exam day, because they simply ask a student to provide a final numeric value. However, to fully understand the material, and do well on the AP Physics exams, it’s important to know and show the process of arriving at the final answer. Based on our research, we see strong evidence that reinforcing the problem-solving process can have a significant impact on exam results for Physics students in college-level courses.

Our development of the Expert TA Online AP Physics I Study Guide is an effort to help AP Physics students receive the same practice that has guided students through rigorous Introductory Physics courses at the college level. In an effort to provide students with much needed practice, specifically using symbolic problem solving, we worked with AP Physics teachers to build modules for each of the key areas of the exam using our best symbolic problems. Additionally, Expert TA is not just for exam preparation, many high school teachers use Expert TA to assign homework in their courses. AP Physics teachers have the option to create weekly homework, quizzes, or tests, and allow their students to engage in guided practice through the study guide.  

For those working in the education realm these days, it seems that you can’t go far without hearing about new educational technology tools, and Instructure’s Canvas LMS is at the top of that list. While Expert TA has no affiliation with Canvas, we always love learning about new classroom technology being used in higher education. Therefore, we decided to dig a little deeper to see what all the buzz surrounding Canvas was about. Although Canvas has a lengthy list of features, here are some of the items we think instructors and students will appreciate most about the system:

1. Data/analytics reporting. All Canvas users receive access to Canvas Data at no additional cost, and instructors can export this data into an analytics tool of their choosing. With this functionality, instructors can quickly see student activity by date, assignment completions, grade distributions and individual student activity. We at Expert TA are big fans of this kind of insight because we provide an extensive analytics reporting tool as well. When both your LMS and homework system help to find learning trends and weak points in understanding, the instructor and students benefit greatly.
2. SpeedGrader. Teachers can easily view and markup student work without downloading or uploading files. This includes highlighting, strikeouts, and freehand drawing. Text messages and other media formats are also available for communicating with students.
3. Canvas Commons. Canvas has a learning object repository (LOR) that claims to have a more intuitive platform for searching and sharing content. Instructors can digitally share educational content, teaching resources and ideas for the classroom in a central hub that is organized and searchable.
4. Organization. In a review by students at Penn State, enthusiasm centered around the planning tools that allow students to keep track of deadlines and assignments. Besides the calendar tool, students can utilize the Files feature to organize documents, ePortfolios to feature project work, and setup news subscriptions among a long list of other tools meant to help students stay organized.
5. Collaboration. Student groups can collect shared documents, interact in threaded discussions, and convene online group meetings in order to efficiently complete group projects and assignments. In addition, the Chat feature allows students and instructors to communicate in real time, a perfect way for instructors to create virtual office hours. The usability seems to be one of its featured benefits over competitors as one reviewer commented, “It simply feels better to use”.

Although many would think that in 2016, technology’s intrinsic value in the classroom would be a given, educators still debate how important technology is in education as they struggle to implement it in a helpful way. We believe that every instructor who is able to get over the implementation hurdles will continue to discover tools that get more exciting every day, leading to greater benefits for both teachers and students.  

Case in point: This article from Education Week highlights the four pillars of “personalized learning” that were created by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation and EDUCAUSE.  As we gain insight from emerging research, we push ourselves every day to further develop our products in order to provide more value to students. We are thrilled to play even a small part in the future of this concept, because it combines two of our biggest passions at Expert TA: big data and student understanding. We hope you enjoy the article as much as we did. 

Hints and feedback are often used interchangeably in the world of online homework systems. However, while they both hold an important place in student learning, they are not synonyms. Too many companies suggest their systems offer feedback when they truly mean hints: static suggestions based on the question and not on an individual student’s answer.

What is the difference between hints and feedback, and which is more effective for students?  First, let’s define the terms. A hint is a slight or indirect indication or suggestion. Educationally, hints are not meant to give students pinpointed help, but offer generalized, pre-programmed instructional advice. When a student is staring at a blank sheet of paper, not sure where to begin, hints are the right tool to lead them down a good path.

By contrast, feedback is defined as information given specifically based on a person’s performance, usually offered as a basis for improvement or better understanding. This means feedback within a homework system should always consider a student’s incorrect answer and respond accordingly.  Feedback helps a student course-correct after having veered off track. Both hints and feedback have learning value,  and each have their place helping students achieve a successful outcome.

Expert TA is one of few companies with the technology to offer both hints and feedback, and our human-like feedback is the product of analyzing five years’ worth of student data across hundreds of schools. By looking at incorrect answers and mining the data for which portions students commonly got wrong, we were able to isolate specific parts of each problem, then tailor feedback to address appropriate misconceptions. We then ask our staff of instructors to help us create guided, Socratic feedback from this data.  We want the feedback to be shown in a similar way to how an instructor might explain a wrong answer to a student during office hours if they were working the problem together. (Read more about our data-mining process here and then dive into one of our Expert TA Analytics case studies.)

Let’s look at some examples of hints and feedback in Expert TA. For context, instructors using Expert TA have access to thousands of comprehensive introductory physics problems. All of our problems have a difficulty rating of 1 to 5. The following problem is a level 5 and illustrates the difference between hints and feedback in the context of one of our more challenging problems. 

The highlighted section below shows a hint that a student could access for this question:

When a student makes a mistake, the resulting feedback is specific to their error:

As a company, offering individualized feedback is the result of an intentional desire to give students an effective homework experience that serves their individual needs.  Hints are there to help all students holistically. And when used together, students experience a learning environment where they have the right tool at their disposal no matter where they are in the problem-solving process.

NOTE: Ultimately, hints and feedback are both ineffective if students never choose to access them. That is why Expert TA encourages its professors to first fine-tune their settings to maximize effectiveness for students. Then, a short conversation with students takes place at the beginning of each semester to encourage them to take advantage of hints and feedback, and to explain the advantages of each and how it will help maximize their student learning.