Need Assessment for Graduate Teaching Assistant Training: Identifying Important But Under-Prepared Roles

This paper describes a need assessment survey that was developed to gain the perspectives of students, faculty, and graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) as a precursor to developing a training program.On the first portion of the instrument, volunteers from all groups rated the importance they placed on each of 24 GTA roles and responsibilities.Additionally, GTAs and faculty rated the GTAs" competence on each of these categories.Results showed that faculty ranked GTA competence lower than the GTAs did on all categories.On the importance ratings, GTAs placed significantly higher importance on all categories of GTA roles and responsibilities than faculty and students did.Both GTAs and faculty reported high discrepancy between importance and competence in the categories of "instructional practices" and "engagement with students".Faculty reported high discrepancy between importance and competence in the "TA Preparedness" category while GTAs did not.The diverse needs, viewpoints, and perspectives of the three groups that were captured by this survey provide interesting insight and valuable data for designing a GTA training program.