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Characterizing social behavior patterns in teaching assistant interactions with students

Joe Olsen1,*, Debbie Andres2, Nicolette Maggiore3, and Charles Ruggieri4

  • 1Graduate School of Education, Rutgers University, 10 Seminary Place, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08901, USA
  • 2Paramus High School, 99 E Century Road, Paramus, New Jersey 07652, USA
  • 3Department of Chemistry, Tufts University, 62 Talbot Avenue, Medford, Massachusetts 02155, USA
  • 4Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rutgers University, 136 Frelinghuysen Road, Piscataway, New Jersey 08854, USA

  • *joseph.olsen@rutgers.edu
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Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res. 19, 020129 – Published 13 September, 2023

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.19.020129

Abstract

Understanding how relationships between instructors and students develop is important for understanding the undergraduate student experience. We expect the development of positive relationships is related to the social practices (e.g., greetings, using names, sympathizing, or empathizing with students) that instructors use in the course of normal classroom interactions with students. We recorded interactions between instructors and students in remote synchronous online physics problem-solving sessions and surveyed students about their perceptions of their instructors. We selected the highest-rated instructor and lowest-rated instructor in our sample and identified social practices in their conversations with students. We first characterized the frequency of social practice usage by each instructor in their conversations with students. We find that both instructors relied on a set of core social practices in most conversations with students, but that our higher-rated instructor used comparatively more positive commentary and sympathizing or empathizing behaviors than our lower-rated instructor. In comparison, our lower-rated instructor engaged in more negative commentary. Using network analysis, we then explored patterns in co-occurrences of social practices used by each instructor moment-to-moment in conversations and compared the instructors’ social practice network patterns. We find that our higher rated-instructor used a greater variety of social practices during moment-to-moment interactions with students, while our lower-rated instructor spent most of his time focused on classroom business. We suggest that professional development for instructors should include guidance on how messages are delivered in classes and encourage the use of high-impact social practices to foster positive relationships with students.

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Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res. 19, 020129– Published 13 September, 2023
  • Received 13 January 2023
  • Accepted 2 August 2023
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

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