Effects of training programs for university teaching assistants: A review of empirical research

An experimental study indicates that trained TAs make more use of objectives and engage in more student-centered teaching than do the non-trained. As the adequacy of training for college teachers has been criticized more and more widely during the past fifteen or twenty years, countess pre-service orientation programs, in-service workshops, seminars, apprenticeship programs, intern programs, extern programs, and the like have been developed. Duri1.1g roughly the same period, the recruitment of teaching assistants (TAs) has been extended-for both pedagogical antj bu'dgetary reasons-to the undergraduate level itself, and the use of ~ndergraduate TAs may have helped to heighten the perceived need for training as well as to increase the number and diversity of training programs pressed into servic