Table 1
Categories Emerging from the Open Coding of the Focus Group Interviews.
| CATEGORY | CATEGORY DESCRIPTION | TYPICAL QUOTATION |
|---|---|---|
| Educational activities | TAs describe the educational activities they are asked to perform at their university. | “As a [TA], I was responsible for the working group meetings and for the grading of assignments and exams of the students, [and] we facilitated student feedback and feed-forward during the course, the student evaluations, [and] we were the liaison with the different educational committees.” |
| Subject knowledge | TAs describe the importance of subject knowledge needed to perform the educational activities, and they describe ways in which this knowledge is acquired if it is not present. | “You just revisit the literature, you read through it, you take a look at the most recent lecture slides of the faculty teacher. You basically update knowledge that you are supposed to have anyway.” |
| Current training and supervision | TAs describe the type and level of preparation, guidance, and training they received for the educational activities performed, or they reflected on the lack of preparation, guidance, and training. | “In my experience [as a TA], in case of the more theoretical subjects, you are somewhat thrown into the deep end, and you are supposed to figure out for yourself how to approach it. And, yeah, sometimes the answers to the problems are not available, either, [and] I think that is not a good thing, because I [the TA] do work alongside my study, and that is actually hard enough to combine as it is. I really notice that now.” |
| (Subject) pedagogy | TAs describe the role of general pedagogy and subject pedagogy in both the educational activities they are asked to perform and the corresponding training they received. | “[I do miss] some didactical training, like, ‘Hey, how do you explain this subject well?’ I believe there have been one or two didactical lessons, but that was just an email saying, ‘Hey, by the way, there is a lesson, and it’s nice if you can be there if you can make it.’ But yeah, if you’re then just following a medical internship, then that is often not convenient.” |
| Expectations | TAs describe their expectations of the educational work prior to starting and they compare these expectations to their actual experiences as TAs. | “Actually, we had applied to become a mentor … but we were appointed to teach classes, just because that was what they needed due to Corona circumstances. But there were quite a lot of students who did not really want that. They were a kind of thrown into the deep without getting support [from the university] like, ‘How do you feel in front of a group?’ ” |
| Value of an STQ | TAs describe the added value of an STQ as they perceive it. | “I think that having been a [TA] really says something about what you are able to do, and that it has advantages inside and outside of academia, in your personal life and in your professional life. And that this merits a qualification, a certificate or something like that, that it really has that value.” |
| Qualification process | TAs describe their preferences for the demands and activities required to obtain an STQ. | “Someone [I know] has [a teaching qualification] in education … as a faculty member. In that case you … really have a number of pillars that are being evaluated, [and] you may expect something similar here. One of them indeed is subject knowledge. [But also], can you be a professional in front of a classroom? [And] can you develop course material independently? … I think you can find some inspiration there and that it is possible to test this in principle.” |
| Form of an STQ | TAs describe the form the STQ should preferably take. | “I would not use extra study credits, because I think that, yeah, if you want to do something like that in your study, you should just do an educational study. … Credits are for your actual subjects. … But … something on your diploma of a certificate or something, that sounds good to me.” |
| Disadvantages of an STQ | TAs describe perceived disadvantages of an STQ. | “For students, there are no disadvantages if it is just, like, optional and things are just reasonably well organized.” |
[i] Note. Quotations have been translated from Dutch.
Figure 1
Focus Group Quotations.
Note. This figure shows the distribution of the 130 self-contained quotations from the two focus group interviews over the categories.
Figure 2
Relational Visual Representing the Outcomes of the Present Study.