As STEM jobs in the United States are set to expand by 8% between 2019-2029, it has become ever more pressing to train well qualified and proficient Chemistry graduates who are experienced in the lab, conceptually literate, and socio-culturally aware. In order to achieve this, institutions will require highly trained teaching assistants (TAs) to support education development. This symposium is designed to provide a platform to promote research focused on TA professional development. For the purposes of this symposium, we are defining teaching assistants as graduate teaching assistants, undergraduate teaching assistants, or learning assistants. We consider professional development to be any training or targeted intervention designed and/or implemented to support and understand the needs of teaching assistants.
We will be accepting two categories of abstracts for this symposium
1) Early research projects: For this category, you will present projects in their early stage of development/implementation where you are looking for support, advise, or potential collaboration for your project. The intent of the project you are developing should have teaching assistants as the focus of your study. Your presentations should close with 1 or 2 key questions that you would like to crowdsource potential solutions from the audience.
2) Late stage/ completed projects: For this category, you will present the results of late stage or completed projects where the focus of the study participants are teaching assistants. Here we expect the presentation of substantial results, key findings/implications and explicit suggestions for how to implement practices in other settings.