An Observational Study of Undergraduate Teaching Assistants’ Use of Subgoal Learning Integrated in an Introductory Programming Course

In this paper we study an approach to support undergraduate teaching assistants - UTAs - in their teaching with more pedagogical content knowledge. This paper builds upon prior work on the integration of explicit strategies to observe and analyse how UTAs make actual use of subgoal learning (SL) as explicit instructional strategy in their daily teaching practice. From empirical evidence, we extract instructional design advice on how to integrate different subgoal learning strategies throughout a CS1 course. Our study 1) focuses on the effects of SL integration in UTA practice, 2) explores fidelity of their implementation of SL and 3) studies the different ways UTAs use the strategies. We use observations and surveys to analyse UTAs interventions during their lab sessions, and cross these observations results with UTAs' self-reported data through two surveys. Our main results are that SL integration through exercises is a major trigger of strategy use. Training and follow-up of the UTAs have impact, since UTAs feeling familiar with subgoal learning correlates positively with their successful observed use of subgoal learning. More frequent and stronger uses of the strategy were observed by UTAs self-reporting more frequent uses. And finally, UTAs express that subgoals are best suited for introducing concepts and especially the more structured ones.