Exploring the Role of Graduate Teaching Assistants in an Immersive VR Laboratory Experience
Abstract: Virtual labs hold promise to provide this engagement while promoting skills for the 21st century workplace. The role of the instructor and more specifically the Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTA) is still a topic that is not well understood. This was an exploratory pilot study conducted to observe the actions of students and GTAs during a fully immersive VR laboratory exercise. The participants in the study were graduate teaching assistants and undergraduates enrolled in a developmental biology class at a large research university in the southeast United States. When looking at the number of total interactions in each laboratory section it is clear that GTA-student interaction outweighs Student-Student interaction though both types of interaction are low. There also appears to be no relation to the amount of GTA-Student interactions and the time it took to complete the laboratory as there is no significant difference when comparing the 3 different classes.
Presider: Monique Woodard, Wilkes University