IDENTIFYING THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTORS AFFECTING THE PERFORMANCE OF TEACHING ASSISTANTS (TAS) IN ENGINEERING FIELDS

Mosayebi, Seyed Ali; Khani Alamoti, Mahmoud

doi:10.22047/ijee.2025.487523.2130

IDENTIFYING THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTORS AFFECTING THE PERFORMANCE OF TEACHING ASSISTANTS (TAS) IN ENGINEERING FIELDS

Document Type : Scientific - Research

Authors

Seyed Ali Mosayebi ¹

Mahmoud Khani Alamoti ²

¹ Assistant Professor of the Faculty of Railways, Iran University of Science and Technology

² PHD Candidate at Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic)

https://doi.org/10.22047/ijee.2025.487523.2130

Abstract

Today, teaching assistants play an undeniable role in improving student learning. Therefore, identifying their problems can lead to a significant improvement in the quality of students’ teaching and learning. The aim of this research is to investigate the most important factors affecting the performance of teaching assistants, and at the end, solutions are presented with the aim of helping to improve their performance. So, after identifying the most important influencing factors, a questionnaire was given to 156 students with teaching assistant experience. The reliability of the questionnaire was estimated as 0.78 based on Cronbach’s alpha method. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to check the correctness of the relationships considered in the model. The results indicated the existence of a significant relationship between all six latent variables with the main structure of assistants’ performance. Also, the most important results showed that from the point of view of most assistants (96%), more coordination with professors through holding regular meetings is among the most effective factors. Also, most of the teaching assistants (83%) do not agree with repeating all the material stated by the professors. Most of them (71%) do not consider holding related training workshops to increase their teaching skills too.

Keywords

Teaching assistants

engineering students

education

confirmatory factor analysis

20.1001.1.16072316.1404.27.107.7.1

Subjects

Research on Engineering Education

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