Evaluating Tertiary Students’ Perceptions of the English Teaching Assistants’ Role in Teaching and Learning

Abstract

This chapter describes the development, piloting and validation of an instrument that evaluates students’ perceptions of English Teaching Assistant’s (ETA) role in teaching and learning situations in a teacher-education institution in Hong Kong. The chapter consists of two parts: a pilot study and the validation study of the Student Evaluation of English Teaching Assistant Role Scale (SETARS). Participants in the pilot study were 153 pre-service student-teachers who were asked to rate their agreement to 20 statements related to two ETAs’ role in and out of classroom situations on a 4-point category; from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 4 (Strongly Agree), with an additional category of “Not-Applicable”. The scale fitted the Rasch model well with the exception of two items. These items were removed from the scale for the validation study. The “Not Applicable” category was found to cause high missing values, and hence, removed from the scale. The validation study was carried out on 294 pre-service student-teachers’ perceptions of eight ETAs across courses. Although the overall item and person fit and reliability of the tool was acceptable, the infit and outfit t values for a number of the items were larger than desired (-2.00 <t<+2.00). It was suspected that this anomaly existed because the scale was meant to measure students’ perceptions of one or at the most two ETA(s) in a teaching and learning situation. Accordingly, the individual items spread and reliability improved when data were separately analysed for individual ETAs; with overall item spread reliability ranging from 0.90 to 0.94, and individual item’s mean square ranged between 0.20 to 1.7, and standardised t generally being within the acceptable range. This shows that the SETARS is a valid and reliable unidimensional measure of students’ perceptions of specific English Teaching Assistants’ (ETAs) role in teaching and learning situations in Hong Kong. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the SETARS can help educators to optimise students’ learning environment by evaluating the perceived teaching and learning assistance given by English Teaching Assistants.