Background: Undergraduate teaching assistants (UTAs) are associated with increased student performance and belongingness. Yet, when given a choice, not all students leverage UTA-facilitated opportunities equally. Objective: This study explores motivational and contextual factors that underlie individual differences in students' willingness to…

The purpose of this study was to demonstrate how a structured experiential course can be used to teach students to lead group discussions. Group dynamics and leadership skills were taught through two teaching strategies in the course: the first method required junior- and senior-level undergraduate students to participate in a process-oriented…

Social presence (represented by salience of instructor and fellow students) in an online teaching environment has been shown to influence perceptions of course activity and self-estimates of learning. An experiment is described here in which teacher presence is manipulated via personalized messages from the teaching assistant throughout the…

As class sizes increase due to stagnating budgets, and as colleges and universities around the nation increase enrollment, more faculty (especially those without graduate students) are turning to undergraduate teaching assistants (UTA) to meet the increasing demands on academia. We surveyed 142 students enrolled in courses that utilized UTAs to…

The movement to prepare graduate students to teach is relatively new in the history of the academy. During the past several decades, many graduate departments of psychology, like many academic departments, have gone from providing essentially no training to graduate students to teach to developing extensive training programs consisting of course…

This study explored graduate teaching assistant (GTA) grading on 480 papers across two writing assignments as integrated into large Introductory Psychology courses. We measured GTA accuracy, consistency, and commenting (feedback) quality. Results indicate that GTA graders improved, although unevenly, in accuracy and consistency from Time 1 to 2…

Experts have advocated anonymous grading as a means of eliminating actual or perceived evaluator bias in subjective student assessment. The utility of anonymity in assessment rests on whether information derived from student identity can unduly influence evaluation. The halo effect provides a conceptual background for why a bias might occur. In…

This article presents an interview with William Buskist, the Distinguished Professor in the Teaching of Psychology at Auburn University and a Faculty Fellow at Auburn's Biggio Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning. At Auburn, he directs the Psychology Department's Teaching Fellows program, which prepares graduate students for…

Across 4 years, 87 teaching assistants (TAs) completed measures designed to assess personal efficacy, teacher efficacy, and liking for teaching before (pretest) and after (posttest) a weeklong training program. Paired sample t tests revealed a significant increase in personal efficacy and liking for teaching, a significant positive correlation…

Can short, ungraded, free-writing assignments promote learning of course material? We randomly assigned introductory psychology recitation sections (N = 978 students) to writing or thinking conditions. For all sections, teaching assistants presented students with a discussion topic based in current coursework. Students either wrote or thought…

We describe a program for involving undergraduate teaching assistants (UTAs) in many types of psychology courses, as well as a 1-credit seminar for preparation of UTAs. The program, widely used by both faculty and students, has matured over a 10-year period. The seminar covers such topics as course organization, evaluation procedures, and…

An experimental study was conducted to determine whether a training program for teaching assistants that was highly general in scope would (1) affect the participants' teaching behavior; and (2) improve their students' ratings of instruction. (Author/JR)

The personalized system of instruction (PSI) is presented as a teaching system with characteristics that render it especially vulnerable to being misused or abused by teachers, students, and administrators. Examples are provided along with reasons why misuse and abuse may contribute to negative attitudes about the system. (Author)

Undergraduate psychology teaching assistants were given increased responsibilities by having them teach weekly lab classes. The assistants conducted a weekly seminar for instruction in group facilitating skills and held office hours for students. Both the assistants and their students rated the experiment as highly successful. (CS)

Describes a set of exercises called Bringing Psychology to Life (BPL), which is designed to engage introductory psychology students in learning course and textbook content by having them develop psychological explanations for events in their lives. Maintains that BPL is an excellent icebreaker for graduate teaching assistants and a vehicle for…