Undergraduate Computing Tutors' Perceptions of their Roles, Stressors, and Barriers to Effectiveness
This program is tentative and subject to change.
Undergraduate teaching assistants (tutors) are commonly employed in computing courses to help students with programming assignments. Prior research in computing education has reported the benefits of tutoring both for students and for the tutors’ own learning. In contrast, recent research that examined actual tutoring sessions has reported that these sessions may be less productive than one might hope, with tutors often just giving students the answers to their problems without trying to teach the underlying concepts. To better understand why tutors may be employing these suboptimal practices, we interviewed ten tutors across early computing courses in higher education to identify their perceived role in these sessions, what stressors and factors influence their ability to perform their job effectively, and what kinds of best practices they learned in their tutor training course. Tutors reported their roles around student learning, gauging student understanding, identifying or providing solutions to students, and providing socioemotional support. They reported their stressors around environmental factors (e.g., number of students waiting to be helped, preparation time, peer-tutor frustrations), internal influences, student behavior, student skill levels, and feeling the need to ``read a student’s mind.'' Regarding their tutor training course, Tutors reported learning about interaction guidelines and procedures and question-based problem solving. We conclude by discussing how these results may contribute to the less-effective behaviors seen in prior research and potential ways to improve tutoring in computing courses.
This program is tentative and subject to change.
Thu 27 FebDisplayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change
15:45 - 17:00 | |||
15:45 18mTalk | Exploring the Humanistic Role of Computer Science Teaching Assistants across Diverse Institutions Papers Grace Barkhuff Georgia Institute of Technology, Ian Pruitt Georgia State University, Vyshnavi Namani Georgia Institute of Technology, William Gregory Johnson Georgia State University, Rodrigo Borela Georgia Institute of Technology, Ellen Zegura Georgia Institute of Technology, Anu Bourgeois Georgia State University, Benjamin Shapiro Georgia State University | ||
16:03 18mTalk | Iterative Design of a Teaching Assistant Training Program in Computer Science Using the Agile MethodGlobal Papers Runda Liu Tsinghua University, Shengqi Chen Tsinghua University, Jiajie Chen Tsinghua University, Songjie Niu Tsinghua University, Yuchun Ma Tsinghua University, Xiaofeng Tang Tsinghua University | ||
16:22 18mTalk | Student Application Trends for Teaching Assistant Positions Papers Felix Muzny Northeastern University, Abdulaziz Suria Northeastern University - Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Carla Brodley Northeastern University, Center for Inclusive Computing | ||
16:41 18mTalk | Undergraduate Computing Tutors' Perceptions of their Roles, Stressors, and Barriers to Effectiveness Papers Ismael Villegas Molina University of California, San Diego, Jeannie Kim University of California, San Diego, Audria Montalvo University of California, San Diego, Apollo Larragoitia University of California, San Diego, Rachel S. Lim University of California San Diego, Philip Guo University of California San Diego, Sophia Krause-Levy University of San Diego, Leo Porter University of California San Diego |