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Center for Academic Practice and Resources
e-mail：capr@hiroshima-u.ac.jp
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The Centre for Academic Practice and Resources manages Teaching Assistants (TAs) at Hiroshima University, the so-called, “HirodaiTA”. Students who have engaged in TA duties are required to report their achievements. To overview their achievements, the Centre analysed TAs’ descriptions of their achievements in their reports.
The analysis included roughly 1300 Qualified Teaching Assistants’ (QTAs) reports. Due to the large number of reports, we analysed them using basic text mining techniques.
The figure on the left provides the five clusters of words that were often used together in TAs’ reports (indicated by different colours).
The descriptions of their reports can be summarized as follows:
1) Reports in English (in red),
2) Assisting students and preparing for classes and teaching (in blue),
3) Some relationships between reduced workload and TAs’ ability development (in yellow),
4) Deepening TAs’ own general, research-related and disciplinary knowledge (in purple), and
5) Supporting effective teaching activities (in questions, material preparation, practical work and assignments) (in green).
It seems that these descriptions are generally consistent with the purposes of the HirodaiTA system, and we are happy to see that their achievements are in line with our objectives.
On the other hand, since the analysis was conducted putting English and Japanese reports together, we were not able to see what kind of achievements were made in the English reports.
The Centre continues to examine TAs’ reports so that we can promote effective TA practices.
