RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 The Ph.D. Panic: Examining the relationships among teaching anxiety, teaching self-efficacy, and coping in Biology graduate teaching assistants (GTAs)
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2020.02.07.938597
DO 10.1101/2020.02.07.938597
A1 Miranda M. Chen Musgrove
A1 Elisabeth E. Schussler
YR 2020
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/02/07/2020.02.07.938597.abstract
AB Anxiety among graduate students in the United States has increased over the last several decades, affecting not only their overall mental health but also reducing retention in graduate programs. Teachers with high teaching anxiety can negatively impact student learning, yet the impacts of teaching anxiety on graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) is not well studied. Biology GTAs teach most introductory Biology labs and discussions nationally, thus broadly influencing the quality of undergraduate education. In Fall 2016, we investigated Biology GTA teaching anxiety at a large research-intensive southeastern university by (1) measuring teaching anxiety of Biology GTAs, and (2) exploring the relationships among teaching anxiety, self-efficacy, and coping. Using multiple linear regressions, we found that greater teaching self-efficacy is related to lower teaching anxiety in Biology GTAs (R2adi =0.65, p<0.001). Coping strategies and frequencies did not significantly contribute to teaching anxiety in our models. We found similar levels of teaching anxiety across genders, ethnicities, student citizenship status (domestic vs. international) and teaching experience level. However, there were significant differences among student subgroups in teaching self-efficacy and coping strategies. Effective coping may contribute to the lack of anxiety differences among some of the student subgroups. These results can inform teaching professional development for GTAs, and encourage greater awareness and dialogue about the impacts of mental health issues in academia.