Teaching Assistant Standard Operation Procedures (SOP)
Welcome to Brad Cannell's Epidemiology III course at UTHealth!👋 This page is intended to be a resource for course teaching assistants (TAs). At 50% FTE, School of Public Health TAs are expected to work a max of 20 hours per week. My personal expectation is that you will spend at least 10 hours per week working on this course. If you aren't able or willing to do so, please reach out to me for a discussion about your availability. In general, TAs will spend their hours working on the following 3 primary activities in this course:
- Tutoring/Teaching
- Grading
- Developing course materials
Each of these activities is covered in greater detail below.
Many students love learning from TAs and hearing your perspective on the course content. Therefore, I would like you to attend all class/lab sessions, and provide your perspectives while you are there. I would also like for you to hold weekly office hours of your own, which students should be able to attend virtually.
Prior to the first class session, please decide the day(s) and time(s) when you would like to hold your office hours. After you decide, please post them in the Welcome module of our Canvas homepage as shown in the screenshot below.
To do so:
- Click the gray plus sign
+in the top-right corner of the module - Change the drop-down menu next to the word
AddtoExternal URL - Add the link to your remote meeting service of choice (e.g., Zoom, WebEx, Teams) to the
URLbox - In the
Page Namebox, write "Link to [your name] weekly virtual office hours ([day(s) and time(s)]" as shown in the screenshot above
Students will often want you to "just give them the answer" to a challenging question. And giving them the answer may feel like the compassionate and/or efficient thing to do. However, there is a fair amount of research that suggests that the most profound learning/growth occurs when we have to struggle to find a solution to a problem -- far more so than when we are simply told the solution to a problem. Therefore, we should always strive to guide students to the answer rather than provide them with the answer.
In practice, this might look something like...
- "Hmm, where have you seen a scenario like this before? What did you do then?" instead of "Add 2 + 2 here just like we did on last week's assignment."
- "Doesn't the book talk about interpreting an odds ratio? Let's take a look at that example and see if it can help us with this question." instead of "An odds ratio should be interpretted as..."
Please take extra care not to provide answers when students are asking you for help with module quizzes. Module quizzes are intended to assess each student's ability to independently apply the concepts we have been covering in class. However, the labs and module quizzes are generally designed to pretty closely mirror each other. So, if a student asks you about a question on the module quiz that says, "Use the cor.test() function to explore the relationship between age of mother and weight of child in ounces. Is there a positive, negative, or no correlation between age of mother and weight of child in ounces?" Instead of telling them the answer or directly showing them how to write the code needed to get the answer, it would be better to remember that the lab had the following question, "Use the cor.test() function to explore the relationship between age and initial heart rate. Is there a positive, negative, or no correlation between age and initial heart rate?" Then, ask them to open their lab code and go over that question until they understand if fully.
TAs are often heavily involved in grading assignments. Depending on how many TAs are assigned to the course in a given semester, you may be asked to help with some or all of the grading.
In general, I try to design the Check on Learning Quizzes, Labs, and Module Quizzes in such a way that Canvas will do the majority of the grading automatically. However, there are some question types (e.g., fill-in-the-blank, essay, and file submission) that need to be manually graded in some cases. This is done in Canvas' Speedgrader.
So, for each assignment, it's a good idea to look through a few of the submissions in their entirety and figure out what questions, if any, look like they may be tricky. Then, feel free to email me and discuss a plan for grading those potentially tricky questions. It's much easier for us to discuss grading ahead of time than it is to try to change grades after the fact.
Additionally, each lab assignment includes an optional lab feedback question. It isn't worth any points, and students do not have to complete it, but it does have to be manually graded on every lab in order for the student's lab grade to show up in the grade book. As you can see in the screenshot below, we changed the grade for this question from a dash "-" to a "0" in the top-right corner. Again, even though it isn't worth any points, we have to manually change the grade to "0" and then click the Update Scores button in the lower-right-hand corner.
Also, because this student left us some feedback, we want to acknowledge and thank them for it. Because this comment doesn't really have anything of substance that needs to be addressed, it is fine to simply say, "Thank you for the feedback!" In other cases, students will leave comments that have more substance and do need my attention.
The screenshot above shows an example of feedback written by a student that required me to follow up with them. In cases like this, please record the student's name somewhere. When you are finished grading all of the labs, please send me an email with a list of the students who left comments I need to follow up on. I am also very interested in hearing your general impressions of how the lab went and what the students seemed to struggle with.
TAs often have great ideas about what materials are lacking in the course, and what materials could be improved or explained better. Depending on how many TAs are assigned to the course in a given semester, you may be asked to occasionally help me develop new course materials (e.g., quiz questions, examples, curated readings, videos, and/or new modules) or you may be asked to help me develop new course materials every week. We will generally discuss what materials are needed on a more case-by-case basis.