Instructor: Prof. Mai ElSherief (melsherif@ucsd.edu)

Office hours: Friday 4-5 pm (Zoom link) or by appointment

TA: Nazanin Sabri (nsabri@ucsd.edu) 

Office hours: By Appointment

Why take CSE 599?

CSE 599 will help you during your first CSE TA experience. In this class, you will learn how to synthesize information and help others learn it. You will meet weekly with other first-time TAs and a mentor to share your experiences and practice key skills. And you will document your learning process by observing teaching and reflecting on your growth.

References from the Education Research/Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Literature

• Active Learning

  • Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics (Freeman et al. 2014)

  • Science Supports Education: The Behavioral Research Base for Psychology's Top 20 Principles for Enhancing Teaching and Learning (Lucariello et al. 2016)

  • Learning from errors: students' and instructors' practices, attitudes, and beliefs (Pan et al. 2020)

• Growth Mindset and Inclusive Classrooms

  • Making Visible the Behaviors that Influence Learning Environment: A Qualitative Exploration of Computer Science Classrooms (Barker and Garvin-Doxas 2010)

  • STEM faculty who believe ability is fixed have larger racial achievement gaps and inspire less student motivation in their classes (Canning et al. 2019)

  • Silent Technical Privilege (Guo 2014)

  • Structure Matters: Twenty-One Teaching Strategies to Promote Student Engagement and Cultivate Classroom Equity (Tanner 2017)

• Grading

  • The challenges of changing teaching assistants' grading practices: Requiring students to show evidence of understanding (Marshman et al. 2017)

  • Analysis of Grading Times of Short Answer Questions (Yen, Karayev, Wang 2020)

  • What are we thinking when we grade programs? (Fitzgerald et al. 2013)

  • STOP THE (AUTOGRADER) INSANITY: Regression Penalties to Deter Autograder Overreliance (Baniassad 2021)

  • Adaptive Rubrics (Carmosino and Minnes, 2020)

• Imposter Phenomenon and Stereotype Threat

  • Identifying the Prevalence of the Impostor Phenomenon Among Computer Science Students (Rosenstein, Raghu, Porter 2020)

  • Additional Evidence for the Prevalence of the Impostor Phenomenon in Computing (Bernuy et al. 2022)

  • Deciding to Major in Computer Science: A Grounded Theory of Students' Self-Assessment of Ability (Lewis, Yasuhara, Anderson 2011)

  • 'You don't do your hobby as a job': Stereotypes of Computational Labor and their Implications for CS Education (Dym et al. 2021)

  • You Sound Like a Good Program Manager': An Analysis of Gender in Women's Computing Life Histories (Pozos and Friend 2021)

• Cognitive Load and other Education-related Psychology

  • Cognitive Load Theory and Computer Science Education (Sweller 2016)

  • Student and expert understanding of lecture (Hrepic, Zollman, Rebello 2007)

  • Hedy: A Gradual Language for Programming Education (Hermans 2020)

  • The House of Computing: Integrating Counternarratives into Computer Systems Education (Kirdani-Ryan and Ko 2022)

• Academic integrity and instructional design

  • Motivational Perspectives on Student Cheating: Toward an Integrated Model of Academic Dishonesty (Murdock and Anderman 2010)

  • Academic integrity as a teaching and learning issue (Bertram Gallant 2017)

  • Post-Exam Videos for Assessment in Computing Courses: See and Hear Students' Thinking (VanDeGrift 2022)

  • The Impact of Optional Groups on Students (Calver et al 2022)

  • Investigating the skill gap between graduating students and industry expectations (Radermacher, Walia, Knudson 2014)

  • A Quantitative Study of Faculty Views on the Goals of an Undergraduate CS Program and Preparing Students for Industry (Valstar et al 2020)

  • Hiring CS Graduates: What We Learned from Employers (Stepanova et al 2022)

Syllabus

What is the workload for CSE 599 and how is it graded?

CSE 599 is a 2-unit course: expect to spend up to 6 hours per week on this course, including the 80-minute weekly session. The additional three-and-a-half or so hours per week will be spent evaluating and refining your TA activities, preparing for CSE 599 practicum sessions, and consulting background research papers, information guides, and videos.

This class is taken S/U. We hope that every student will successfully earn a passing grade in this class. To do so, you need to meet or exceed the following minimum passing thresholds in each course component by Wednesday of Finals week.

• Engaged practice

• You will practice effective teaching and reflect on your growth over the quarter. In the CSE 599 practicum and in your own TA work, you'll continue to apply and grow your skills, while also observing others.

• You are expected to fully participate in every CSE 599 class session, including arriving on time (or early), engaging in group activities (without multitasking), and participating in large- and small-group discussions. On (rare) occasions when unavoidable circumstances require you to miss a class session, you are expected to notify the CSE 599 TA and the instructor ahead of time, and to propose and carry out a plan to make up the missed work. One way to make up the missed work is described in the relevant documents in the assignment descriptions folder.

• You must complete the CSE 599 pre-class and post-class survey and any other assigned surveys or reflections in a timely manner.

• Project

• There are several options for this assignment so that you can customize your CSE 599 work to your goals for your TA experience and this quarter.

• Each of these options has assigned checkpoints to be completed by Wednesday of Week 6.

• You must complete the CSE 599 Project assignment by Wednesday of finals week.

• Please see the details in the assignment descriptions folder.

Around Week 6 of the quarter, we will have a checkpoint to confirm that you are on track for successfully completing the course requirements. Students who do not pass this checkpoint may not be offered TA appointments for the next quarter.

With the successful completion of this class, you will be able to: 

1. Effectively carry out the basic roles and responsibilities of CSE TAs at UC San Diego.

• Communicate with your instructor to align expectations about the specific roles and responsibilities of your TA position

• Effectively plan and deliver discussion sections with clear learning objectives and implementing active learning strategies.

• Create and use rubrics to support efficient and replicable grading.

• Maintain and safeguard protected student data.

2. Connect professionalism to teamwork and teaching and reflect on your development as a professional.

• Reflect on your and your teammates' collaborations to assess what's working well, what can be improved, and how to improve it.

• Identify priority areas for attention and improvement, and identify where efficiency can help decrease time spent on non-priority areas.

• Connect skills and insights from your role as a TA to future career goals.

3. Describe several theories of how people learn and apply them to teaching and learning strategies.

• Design specific, low-stakes activities to find out what students do and don't know.

• Use techniques for creating inclusive communities for learning.

Acknowledgments

This course and its resources were adapted from versions developed at UC San Diego by Mia Minnes, Dean Tullsen, Beth Simon, Leo Porter, Gary Gillespie, Christine Alvarado, and Niema Moshiri, and by workshop material developed at University of Calgary by Laleh Behjat. Additional reference material was shared by Stanley Lo, Jim Cooke, and the Teaching + Learning Commons