The Impact of Teaching Assistant on College Students’ Learning Performances in the Collaborative Inquiry-based Robotics Learning

Teaching assistants are considered to play an indispensable role in collaborative inquiry-based learning progress. This study investigated the impact of teaching assistant in the collaborative inquiry-based robotics learning context. A quasi-experimental study was conducted using a sample (n=47) of first-year college students in eastern China for eight classes. Students in the control group (N=24) and experiment group (N=23) received same instruction with the same instructor, the experimental class has teaching assistants while the control class does not. The results showed that students’ communication and collaboration in the experiment group were significant higher than the control group, while students’ self-efficacy were not. This finding indicated that teaching assistants have significant positive impacts on students’ communication and collaboration in the collaborative inquiry-based robotics learning context. In the future, which teaching strategies could enhance the positive impact of teaching assistants on self-efficacy would be studied.