Teaching assistants’ feedback pathways at higher education

Abstract

Teaching assistants (TAs) are considered as an abundant human resource contributing to higher education. Besides their dynamism, creation, high motivation, and open-mindedness, their teaching experiences are still limited and need to be improved. Feedback plays an important role in improving learning and teaching activities involving TAs’ performance as it can assess the learners’ acquiring knowledge and the constructive alignment so timely adjustments could be proceeded. The goal of our group project is to gain deep insight into an analysis of TAs’ feedback by introducing a feedback triangle where we highlight various pathways of feedback to TAs. Additional paths for evaluating the gained feedback is also discussed based on two metrics: student success and alignment of student opinions and educational theory. Overall, the main findings are that the available pathways need to be strengthened and we provide some suggestions on how to do this.