Interactions between teaching assistants and students boost engagement in physics labs

TL;DR

This study shows that proactive TA-student interactions significantly increase student engagement in physics labs, which in turn improves learning outcomes, highlighting the importance of TA behavior in educational settings.

Contribution

It identifies specific TA behaviors, especially initiated interactions, as key predictors of student engagement and learning in physics laboratory courses.

Findings

TA-student interaction frequency predicts engagement

TA-initiated interactions are more effective

Student engagement correlates with improved post-test scores

Abstract

Through in-class observations of teaching assistants (TAs) and students in the lab sections of a large introductory physics course, we study which TA behaviors can be used to predict student engagement and, in turn, how this engagement relates to learning. For the TAs, we record data to determine how they adhere to and deliver the lesson plan and how they interact with students during the lab. For the students, we use observations to record the level of student engagement and pre- and post-tests of lab skills to measure learning. We find that the frequency of TA-student interactions, especially those initiated by the TAs, is a positive and significant predictor of student engagement. Interestingly, the length of interactions is not significantly correlated with student engagement. In addition, we find that student engagement was a better predictor of post-test performance than pre-test scores. These results shed light on the manner in which students learn how to conduct inquiry and suggest that, by proactively engaging students, TAs may have a positive effect on student engagement, and therefore learning, in the lab.