The Development of a Scoring Rubric for Studying Graduate Teaching Assistants’ Competence in Collaborative Learning Lesson Planning and Implementation

Abstract

Teaching assistants play an important role in teaching and learning in tertiary institutions. In this study, we explore the development and use of a scoring rubric to investigate Graduate Teaching Assistants’ (GTAs) competence in adopting collaborative learning (CL) scripts during a two-day Teaching Assistant Programme (TAP). In particular, we evaluate the extent in which the rubric can reliably help us examine GTAs’ effectiveness in instructional planning and implementation during the programme’s microteaching sessions. GTAs from one cohorts of TAP volunteered to participate in this study. Video recordings of the micro-teaching sessions and GTAs’ written lesson plans were collected and used for analysis with a scoring rubric. The scoring rubric was developed through an iterative process by student research assistants and a researcher, grounded in research literature about CL scripting, and included the following criteria: Prior Knowledge, Evaluation and the five components of a CL script. Overall, the findings indicated that the rubric provided a detailed evaluation of GTAs’ use of the CL scripts to structure and teach a CL lesson. GTAs were found to be able to design interesting CL activities, but were less focused on role assignment and distribution, and in monitoring and evaluating the outcomes of CL. It is through the evaluation of micro-teaching using the rubric that we uncovered how GTAs interacted with their ‘students’ to bring about CL, and to have a sense of how co-construction of knowledge worked or did not work. The implications of this study were discussed in relation to the development and use of a lesson planning and observation scoring rubric.