Characterizing social behavior patterns in teaching assistant interactions with students

• Published in: Physical review. Physics education research 2023-09, Vol.19 (2), p.020129, Article 020129
• Main Authors: Olsen, Joe, Andres, Debbie, Maggiore, Nicolette, Ruggieri, Charles
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 2469-9896; 2469-9896
• DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.19.020129

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.