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EECS pedagogical seminar

Wednesday November 13, 12:15-13:00

Time: Wed 2019-11-13 12.15

Location: Campus Valhallavägen, CSC Biblioteket, Lindstedtsvägen 3, Floor 4

Participating: Professor Viggo Kann and Emma Riese, EECS, Division of Theoretical Computer Science

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Training TAs in assessment of programming and CS labs

In our basic courses in programming and computer science, programming assignments and projects correspond to a large part of the course credits. These assignments and projects are typically assessed by teacher assistants (TAs). In an earlier interview study, we have found that TAs experience uncertainty regarding these assessments. The TAs could be unsure of which requirements must be fulfilled in order to pass a student, both in the presented code and in oral presentations of the code. This can lead to a lack of reliability in the assessments, and also to making the TAs’ work situation unnecessarily hard. In this smaller GRU project, we wanted to increase our understanding of why TAs experience this uncertainty and improve the TA training, by organizing workshops about assessment in several iterations. During the project, data was also collected through surveys and in-depth interviews with the TAs. Data was collected both from the assistants who attended our training workshop and from those who did not. During the seminar, we will share our experience and some of the results obtained by the data collection.