Measuring and analyzing Teaching Assistant comfort and content preparation in an Introductory Physics Laboratory Course

Across the United States, Introductory Physics Lab courses are typically broken into multiple sections taught by Teaching Assistants, often graduate TAs. At CU Denver (an Hispanic serving, primarily undergraduate urban university) our Introductory Physics Labs are built on a model of guided-inquiry, and the Teaching Assistant team consists of mostly undergraduate physics majors. As part of a broader project studying the transformation and efficacy of these labs, we seek to better understand how our undergraduate TAs prepare for their roles, and specifically their comfort level with the material. To that end, we have designed weekly surveys for our TAs and implemented them over multiple semesters. These surveys involved both Likert style and free-response questions and were designed to probe the progression of TA comfort levels throughout the week, specifically (1) before the preparatory meetings (2) after the preparatory meetings but before teaching, and (3) after teaching. We present a preliminary analysis of these survey results looking at TA comfort over the course of one semester and one academic year. Early analysis results indicate that TA comfort with the material after the weekly preparatory meetings increased throughout the semester. Alongside these results, the amount of time TAs spent preparing content on their own was stable with a small increase over time; however, a larger number of TAs engaged in content preparation before the preparatory meetings at the end of the semester compared to the beginning of the semester.