Catalysts for Success: Training Teaching Assistants to be Effective Research Mentors in a CURE-Based General Chemistry II Laboratory

Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) incorporate authentic research into the required curriculum and have been increasingly applied to STEM courses to provide students with more opportunities to gain research experience. Since CUREs involve research questions with unknown answers, teaching these courses is vastly different from teaching traditional laboratories. Previous research has shown that the students’ experience in the laboratory can be dependent on the instructor or teaching assistants (TAs). In many institutions, TAs are the main content deliverer for the laboratory curriculum with the instructor overseeing the TAs. Thus, it is vital that the TAs get proper professional development (PD) to adequately prepare them to teach a CURE. Many TA PD programs focus solely on pedagogy-based training, but that is insufficient for CURE TAs. In this work, we present a seven-week TA PD program that centers on building TAs’ research mentorship skills. Throughout the training, we surveyed CURE TAs throughout the semester on their mentoring skills, teaching anxiety, and self-efficacy. Using the data provided by four participating TAs, we found these TAs’ self-assessment of their mentoring skills improved. Additionally, our data note that each TA’s level of anxiety and self-efficacy had only small fluctuations compared to other participating TAs, which we attributed to each TA’s level of prior experience with teaching and mentoring. Overall, this work indicates that research mentoring based TA PD is one possible route for effectively supporting TAs in building mentoring and facilitation skills as CURE instructors.