The study focused on the confidence changes after TA training among graduate TAs. The results demonstrated that the current TA training program might not be effective in improving the TAs’ teaching confidence. Furthermore, interest in being a college teacher and school of pharmacy might influence the confidence changes after TA training among graduate TAs.
The TA's confidence plays a critical role in the teaching effect and profoundly impacts their future career development7. In fact, most of the previous studies focused on the influence of TA training on the teaching effect but paid little attention to the TAs’ confidence change and self-efficacy8. Graduate students reported an increase of confidence after TA traning9–12. However, a decrease was observed in the confidence level of TA after training in our study. A study from Brandeis University reported that TAs better understood the difficulties they might face in future teaching13. Many possible reasons might account for the inconsistency, such as the designs of TA training programs, the focus of training activities, ability requirements for TA in different courses, differences in laboratory skill reserves, and so on. Another critical reason might lie in the TAs’ underestimation of TA’s requirements before the TA training. TA training plays an important role in understanding teaching objectives and achieving the basic teaching quality requirements for TAs. After training, they reassessed the gap between their abilities and the requirements of a TA, which might lead to a decrease in TA confidence. At the end of the questionnaire post TA training, TAs mentioned the major problems and concerns they might encounter in the work of TAS. For example, their worries included their limited professional knowledge to answer students’ questions, poor communication skills, insufficient experimental skills and theoretical knowledge, unable to overcome the teaching stress, ability to deal with matters of sudden urgency, lack of time, and difficulty to establish the authority of TAs. Therefore, those worries might increase and get more explicit after TA training and then in turn decrease their confidence.
In the multivariate analysis, we found that previous TA work experience and future career expectations would affect TAs’ confidence. The experience was regarded as a critical factor for the teacher efficacy of TA14. Previous teaching experience might significantly improve the self-efficacy of TA15. Moreover, the TAs’ teaching experiences could improve their methodological research skills16. Though the previous study has reported that TAs with richer experience had a more remarkable performance in teaching17, no evidence of experience has been reported on TAs’ confidence. The current study did not observe a positive association between TA experience and TAs’ confidence. Some reasons might explain the results. For example, the training instructor might propose some requirements for TAs in different courses, especially for laboratory TAs, and TAs need more knowledge and preparation to deal with these difficulties. Branstetter et.al have found that most TAs deemed it unethical to teach as a TA without adequate preparation5. Future studies should focus on the topic and search for solid evidence about the influence of experience on TAs’ confidence. Additionally, we did not find an association between the motivation to be a university teacher and the TAs’ total confidence change. However, for imparting new knowledge accurately to students, those who were disinterested in becoming a college teacher were significantly associated with an increased confidence level compared with neutral Tas. The possible reason is that TAs who were disinterested in becoming a college teacher have low expectations while those who expected to become teachers had higher professional knowledge and expectations at initial, which might explain for their confidence changes. Limited evidence was available on the association between professional development motivation and confidence level change after TA training. Further studies are needed to explore the relationship to give insight into the improvement of TA training programs.
There are several strengths in the survey. First of all, the study is the largest scale study focusing on the TAs’ confidence change after TA training. Benefiting from the complete TA training system of the school, we obtained a large sample size of participants and collected data of relatively high quality. Secondly, our study firstly demonstrated the TAs’ confidence change before and after TA training in Chinese population. Previous researchers have focused on developing a TA reflection system to improve the self-efficacy of TA18, but with limited attention to TAs’ confidence. Our study provided new insight into the improvement of TA training system. Future studies are needed to explore the factors behind the phenomenon to improve the TA training system. There are several limitations. First of all, all the participants were recruited from schools in Peking University Health Science Center, and the results may not be generalized to other schools. Secondly, due to the lack of some characteristic information of the participants, such as gender and age, stratified analysis and multivariate analysis were unable to perform in the current study. However, the TAs were all first- or second- year graduate students, and there was not much difference in the age of graduate students. Additionally, we conducted multivariate analysis adjusting for years, schools, and other potential covariates to investigate the potential factors for the change of confidence levels.