Assessing how a teaching professional development program for biology graduate students bolsters self-efficacy and shapes teaching perspectives

ABSTRACT

Graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) teach undergraduates directly, and many are future faculty, making it particularly important for them to be trained in using evidence-based instructional practices. We implemented and assessed a teaching professional development program for 19 biology GTAs aimed to help them develop their teaching perspectives and improve their teaching self-efficacy. The program consisted of a pre-semester bootcamp of pedagogical workshops, mentoring sessions throughout the semester, crafting a teaching philosophy statement, and reflective peer teaching observation. We surveyed and interviewed students throughout the program to assess their growth and identify elements of the program that supported their growth. We found that participants’ self-efficacy improved immediately following the pre-semester bootcamp, but these improvements did not persist throughout the semester. At the end of the semester, participants’ teaching self-efficacy did not differ from GTAs in the department who did not participate in our program. Throughout the semester, our participants shifted toward the social reform perspective of teaching, which views good teaching as encouraging students to critically evaluate information and give them power to take social action to improve their lives. At the end of the semester, our participants more strongly endorsed the social reform perspective of teaching than GTAs who did not participate in our program. Our results suggest that pre-semester workshops supported novice GTAs before their class, but more sustained interactions may be needed for these boosts to persist. Our results also suggest that encouraging GTAs to reflect on what makes good teaching can help them solidify a coherent teaching perspective.

INTRODUCTION

Knowledge about evidence-based instructional practices (EBIPs) has increased dramatically through advances in education research in recent decades (1, 2). However, widespread adoption of EBIPs in undergraduate Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) classrooms lags (3). Effective professional development for instructors is necessary to close this gap (4–7). A compelling place to focus efforts is on training the next generation of educators: graduate students. Graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) are also important members of instructional teams for introductory-level science courses (4, 5, 8) and often interact with thousands of students in a closer capacity than faculty (9, 10). As current and future instructors, it is imperative that they have opportunities to develop knowledge and experiences using EBIPs.

Graduate teaching assistant professional development

The types of GTA teaching professional development programs vary widely across institutions, ranging from 1 day orientations to semester-long courses (11, 12), with the most common form being a 1 day pre-semester workshop (12). However, research suggests that effective professional development programs are characterized by being longitudinal, being learning oriented, and promoting active and collaborative learning (13).

Reeves et al. (14) proposed a framework of effective teaching professional development programs for graduate students including three dimensions: GTA cognition, GTA practices, and student outcomes. GTA cognition refers to GTAs’ beliefs and knowledge of teaching. GTA practices refer to the actual practices that the GTAs engage in during their teaching (e.g., using EBIPs). Student outcomes refer to students’ experiences and academic achievement, such as persistence, interest, and grade point average (GPA). The framework posits that students’ outcomes can be shaped by the instructional practices of GTAs, which are shaped by GTA cognition. Therefore, exploring GTA cognition is critical for understanding the effectiveness of professional development programs.

GTA cognition and teaching perspectives

Instructors’ beliefs influence how they teach and the extent to which they adopt student-centered and evidence-based approaches (4, 14). Studies have linked the undergraduates’ success with GTAs’ pedagogical training and beliefs about teaching and learning (14, 15). Teaching perspective is a framework that outlines different ways through which an instructor can view what constitutes good teaching and their associated beliefs, intents, and actions (14, 16).

Pratt and Collins (16) conceptualized five teaching perspectives: transmission, apprenticeship, nurturing, development, and social reform. According to the transmission perspective, good instructors have deep mastery of the content and deliver information to students effectively and accurately. Instructors with the apprenticeship perspective view teaching as enculturating students to a set of norms and ways of working and aim to move students toward increasing independence. From the developmental perspective, instructors approach teaching from the learner’s perspective, aiming to help students develop increasingly complex mental models. According to the nurturing perspective, good instructors aim to create a climate of caring and trust, acknowledging that students can grow when they feel comfortable and supported. Finally, from the social reform perspective, instructors encourage learners to critically evaluate information and empower them to take social action to improve their lives. These teaching perspectives, although distinct in their definitions, are not mutually exclusive to one another. Reid and Weigel (17) demonstrate that GTAs often hold one or more of the perspectives described as primary or secondary dominant teaching perspective, and these can be changed after participating in teaching professional development programs.

GTA teaching self-efficacy

Self-efficacy describes one’s confidence in their ability to complete a particular task (18). Teaching self-efficacy can influence instructor’ teaching decisions in a variety of ways, including whether they implement EBIPs (19, 20). Bandura (21) characterized factors that contribute to self-efficacy: mastery experiences (past personal experiences with the task), vicarious experiences (observing peers successfully performing the task), social persuasions (feedback or encouragement from others), and physiological arousal (physical symptoms of stress affecting one’s interpretations of their competence). Across contexts, research suggests that self-efficacy is easier to change at early stages of learning a skill (21). This suggests that novice GTAs are especially amenable to gaining benefits in their teaching self-efficacy from teaching professional development.

Teaching self-efficacy has been conceptualized as having two distinct components: self-efficacy in creating positive learning environments and self-efficacy in using instructional strategies. Self-efficacy for creating a learning environment refers to confidence in creating a student-centered learning environment and promoting support and learning in the classroom (22). Self-efficacy for using instructional strategies refers to confidence in completing instruction-related aspects of teaching, including being updated in content knowledge, using appropriate evaluation and assessments, and being prepared to teach (22).

The Biology Teacher-Scholars program

Teaching perspective and teaching self-efficacy are important components of instructors’ cognition. We developed and implemented a graduate teaching professional development program specifically designed to help novice and experienced GTAs develop coherent teaching perspectives and increase their teaching self-efficacy, called the Biology Teacher-Scholars (BTS) program. Here, we assess how this program impacted the participants.

Research questions

The following research questions guided this study.

Research question 1: to what extent does participation in the BTS program contribute to changes in biology GTAs’ teaching perspectives and teaching self-efficacy?

Research question 2: what programmatic elements support GTAs’ development of teaching perspectives and teaching self-efficacy?

METHODS

We conducted a mixed-method program evaluation of the BTS program to assess how participating graduate students benefited from the program. The author positionality statement can be found in the supplemental material (Appendix 1).

Structure of the BTS program

The BTS program includes a 1.5 day “bootcamp” of workshops before the semester begins as well as regular engagement throughout the semester through mentoring and extended professional development activities. The bootcamp consisted of pedagogical workshops on topics curated to participants’ specific teaching responsibilities (see the supplemental material, Appendix 2, for details).

Participants engaged throughout the semester through monthly mentoring meetings, reflective peer observation, and writing a teaching philosophy. At monthly meetings with program mentors, we aimed to create a sense of community among the GTAs and a space where they could discuss struggles and successes with teaching. These unstructured meetings covered a wide range of discussion topics arising from participants’ needs, including dealing with disruptive or aggressive students and best practices to develop experimental design skills among their students. Participants observed a peer GTA teaching and wrote a reflection of what they learned and how they may apply it to their own teaching. Finally, participants drafted teaching philosophy statements and submitted these at the end of the semester for feedback.

Participants were compensated for their time with a $100 research scholarship that supported participants holistically as graduate students, giving them support and resources for not only their teaching roles but also their researcher roles as well. After completing the BTS program, participants received certificates of completion and were given advice about how they might incorporate their participation in the BTS program into their curriculum vitae (CVs), and mentors offered to review and give feedback.

Context of the study and participants

We implemented the pilot iteration of this program at the biology department of a southern Hispanic-serving institution in the Fall 2022 semester. We recruited all 19 GTAs who were assigned to teach an introductory biology lab course. GTAs were responsible for teaching two lab sections each. They did not develop the syllabus or curriculum, but they designed and graded comprehension quizzes. The participants had a wide range of prior teaching experiences (zero to nine prior semesters as a GTA) (Table 1).

TABLE 1.

Demographics of graduate teaching assistant participants in the first year of the Biology Teacher Scholars program (2022–2023) and non-BTS graduate student respondents

Demographic	Number of BTS participants	%	Number of non-BTS respondents	%
Gender
Men	13	68.4	22	64.7
Women	5	26.3	11	32.4
Non-binary	1	5.3	–a	–
Total	19		33
Nationality
Domestic student	7	36.8	22	64.7
International student	12	63.2	12	35.3
Total	19		34
Teaching experience
0–2 semesters	9	50.0	8	23.5
2–4 semesters	6	33.3	5	14.7
4–8 semesters	2	11.1	11	32.4
More than 8 semesters	1	5.6	10	29.4
Total	18		34

^a –, no responses associated with the demographic were provided.

Quantitative data collection

To assess changes in teaching self-efficacy and teaching perspectives, we surveyed participants at three points: before the bootcamp, immediately after the bootcamp, and at the end of the semester. The surveys included measures of teaching perspectives, teaching self-efficacy, and demographic questions in the first survey (full text of each survey available in the supplemental material, Appendix 3).

We measured participants’ teaching perspectives using the Teaching Perspectives Inventory (TPI) (16). The TPI includes items measuring beliefs, intent, and actions toward each of the five teaching perspectives. Pratt and Collins (16) previously collected evidence of validity based on internal structure with a sample of adult night school learners. We anticipated that changes in teaching perspectives would occur over longer time scales and would not change in the 2 days of the bootcamp, so we included it only on the pre-bootcamp and end-of-semester surveys to reduce participant burden.

We measured participants’ teaching self-efficacy using the GTA-Teaching Self-Efficacy Scale (22). This scale includes two aspects: teaching self-efficacy to create a learning environment and teaching self-efficacy in using various instructional strategies. DeChenne et al. (22) found acceptable evidence of validity based on internal structure with instructors at five universities. Our primary goal for the bootcamp was to boost participants’ sense of preparedness and self-efficacy before the first day of class, especially for inexperienced GTAs. Therefore, we measured teaching self-efficacy at all three survey time points to capture the immediate effect of the bootcamp on participants’ self-efficacy and observe whether the effects lasted throughout the semester.

We also surveyed GTAs in the department who did not participate in the BTS program to serve as a comparison group at the end of the semester. The survey included the same measures as administered to the BTS participants (see Appendix 4 in the supplemental material for full survey text). We hosted a pizza party for all GTAs in the department and asked that they complete our survey while enjoying pizza but did not offer any direct incentive. Demographic information for non-BTS respondents is detailed in Table 1.

Qualitative data collection

We qualitatively assessed participants’ experiences through semi-structured interviews in the spring semester following the program. We designed interview questions to align with the constructs of teaching perspectives (16), teaching self-efficacy (22), and the sources of teaching self-efficacy (23). We specifically sought to explore whether and which components of the BTS program had influenced these constructs. The detailed interview protocol can be found in the supplemental material, Appendix 5. The interviews were conducted in-person and audio recorded by a Zoom meeting with the video turned off. Participants chose their own pseudonyms and were incentivized with a $25 payment.

Quantitative data analysis

Data from survey responses were analyzed using R (version 4.2.2) (24). Due to the small sample for this study, we were unable to estimate confirmatory factor analyses to assess the internal structures of the measures. We relied on previous evidence of validity collected with similar populations for both of our measures.

Non-normality of our data was assessed and confirmed using the Shapiro-Wilk test (25). Responses for each construct were averaged to create a single score and visualized using boxplots (ggplot2 package) (26). To assess change across the semester, we compared survey responses across time points using Kruskal-Wallis and Wilcoxon rank-sum tests (27). We also used these tests to compare BTS participants to biology GTAs who had not participated in the program.

Qualitative data analysis

We transcribed interview recordings using Zoom’s automatic transcript and cleaned them using Otter.ai. All transcripts were checked for accuracy by a research team member. We used deductive approaches when analyzing the transcripts. Our deductive (a priori) codes related to the focal constructs, teaching perspectives (16), and teaching self-efficacy (22). The research team first analyzed transcripts individually and then met as a team to discuss codes to consensus. Throughout this process, we followed the constant comparison method (28) whenever new codes were added to the analysis. The codebook was iteratively revised and updated, and all transcripts were revised as needed so that in the end, they were all analyzed with the final codebook. The final codebook was maintained and updated on the NVivo 14 analysis platform. Once all interview transcripts were analyzed, we summarized our findings as themes.

RESULTS

We identified 12 themes from the interviews. A detailed codebook is provided in the supplemental material, Appendix 6, with sample quotes.

Research question 1: to what extent does participation in the BTS program contribute to changes in biology GTAs’ teaching perspectives and teaching self-efficacy?

We evaluated our first research question by surveying participants at multiple time points and by surveying GTAs in the same department who did not participate in the BTS program at the end of the semester to serve as a comparison group.

Changes in participants’ teaching perspectives

We found significant changes in the overall scores of only one teaching perspective: social reform increased (V = 8, P = 0.05; Fig. 1). We disaggregated the three components of each teaching perspective to gain a more nuanced understanding of participants’ perspectives, which reveals that the increase in the social reform perspective is driven by increases in beliefs (V = 2, P = 0.03) and potentially actions (V = 4.5, P = 0.06), but not intent (V = 15, P = 0.41; Fig. 1). We did not observe any significant changes in any of the components of the other perspectives, suggesting there was uniformly a lack of change in participants’ transmission, apprenticeship, developmental, or nurturing perspectives.

Fig 1.

Changes in teaching perspectives of the participants before and after participation in the BTS program.

Disaggregating the beliefs, intents, and actions revealed some disconnect among these components (Fig. 1). Participants reported that their beliefs aligned most strongly with the apprenticeship and nurturing perspectives, while their intents aligned most strongly with apprenticeship and developmental perspectives, and their actions aligned most strongly with transmission, apprenticeship, and developmental perspectives. Thus, BTS participants were fairly consistently strong in their apprenticeship teaching perspective but reported enacting teaching practices in line with the transmission perspective despite not believing that is how they should teach or intending to teach that way.

Changes in participants’ teaching self-efficacy

Participants experienced a significant improvement in their teaching self-efficacy after the bootcamp. Both components of teaching self-efficacy increased after the bootcamp: instructional strategies (V = 0, P = 0.01) and creating a learning environment (V = 0, P = 0.01; Fig. 2). Participants showed some attenuation across the semester in these benefits in both forms of teaching self-efficacy. For instructional strategies, participants’ self-efficacy at the end of the semester was marginally lower than it was immediately after the bootcamp (V = 26, P = 0.05) but not significantly different from before the bootcamp (V = 10, P = 0.15; Fig. 2). While their difference is not statistically significant, it is worth noting that the lower tail was substantially reduced after the BTS program; that is, a few participants had quite low self-efficacy before the program (around or below 3 on a 1–5 scale), but no participants were below 3.75 at the end of the semester. This suggests that our program was successful in supporting the participants who had the lowest self-efficacy in using instructional strategies before beginning. For creating a learning environment, participants’ self-efficacy at the end of the semester was just as high as it was immediately after the bootcamp (V = 15, P = 0.40) but also not significantly different from before the semester began (V = 7.5, P = 0.09; Fig. 2).

Fig 2.

Changes in teaching self-efficacy of participants before the BTS program, after the bootcamp, and at the end of the program.

Differences in teaching perspectives between BTS participants and non-participant GTAs

We found only one significant difference between BTS participants and non-participants in the overall score for teaching perspectives; BTS participants more strongly endorsed the social reform perspective than non-participants (W = 209, P = 0.001; Fig. 3). This finding aligns with our observation that BTS participants increased only in one perspective, social reform. While not statistically significant, BTS participants tended to also more strongly endorse apprenticeship (W = 180, P = 0.15) and developmental (W = 185.5, P = 0.15) perspectives. While both groups responded to transmission (W = 204, P = 0.29) and nurturing (W = 161.5, P = 0.42) perspectives in a similar manner, it is worth noting that the lower whiskers of boxplots for these perspectives are reduced for BTS participants as compared to non-participants. This implies that BTS participants did not strongly disagree with transmission and nurturing perspectives like some non-participants did. We disaggregated the beliefs, intents, and actions for each perspective to see if any more nuanced trends emerged. Post hoc tests to assess differences in specific teaching perspectives revealed that BTS participants were more likely to endorse beliefs aligning with transmission (W = 249.5, P = 0.03) and social reform (W = 261.5, P = 0.002) (Fig. 3). There were no differences between participants and non-participants in intentions toward any perspective. BTS participants were more likely to report actions related to apprenticeship (W = 218.5, P = 0.04), developmental (W = 221.5, P = 0.03), and social reform (W = 250, P = 0.001) perspectives than non-participant GTAs (Fig. 3).

Fig 3.

Comparison between teaching perspectives of BTS participants and GTA non-participants at the end of the program.

Differences in teaching self-efficacy between BTS participants and non-participant GTAs

Neither aspect of teaching self-efficacy differed between BTS participants and non-participants (Fig. 4). It should be noted that both groups contained GTAs with a large range of teaching experiences that could make it difficult to statistically detect a difference. While it was not significant for self-efficacy in creating learning environments, the least-confident BTS participants scored ~3.5 on a 1–5 scale, while the least confident non-participants scored below 3.5, with one scoring even below 3. This suggests that while the average for the two groups did not differ, the BTS program may have succeeded in bolstering GTAs with the lowest self-efficacy.

Fig 4.

Comparison between teaching self-efficacy of BTS participants and GTA non-participants at the end of the program.

Research question 2: what programmatic elements support GTAs’ development of teaching perspectives and teaching self-efficacy?

Factors that promoted GTAs’ development of teaching perspective

In interviews, we asked participants how the BTS program had impacted the way they now teach their students. While they did not specify a particular program session, Siri described how their view of good teaching changed. They shared:

[From the BTS program] I have learned some things like how I want my students to learn from me. How I can actually know [that] they know what I want them to know. These kind of things like applying [their knowledge] … how we can make a story, instead of just giving them or throwing knowledge at them… This was not [how I did things] initially. I was like, “Okay, I have this chunk of knowledge [and] I'm just telling them this [information]”. But [learning from the BTS] how these stories make a huge story and presenting it in the form of an interesting thing; this is what I have [now] done.

Siri describes their teaching perspective changing from transmission, with an emphasis on giving information, to a more developmental perspective with helping students develop understanding through increasingly complex stories (16).

Maria described how she learned about and became motivated to use EBIPs, which were discussed during BTS bootcamp sessions:

BTS has also helped me understand that there is a whole pool of work that has been done to give us this evidence-based foundation. So, it’s not that these ideas just come out of the blue, it’s that they've been formally studied, experimented upon and people have dedicated their lives to studying phenomena like growth mindset and everything. So, I think that, in a way, has increased my motivation to learn how to use these strategies properly.

In this quote, Maria is referencing a session during the bootcamp led by author L.B.L., who discussed education research and specifically her research on growth mindset and teaching practices to support students’ growth mindset. Maria’s quote suggests that exposing participants to the evidence underlying effective teaching practices helps not only their knowledge of practices but also their motivation to implement them.

Factors that promoted GTAs’ development of teaching self-efficacy

During the interviews, we asked participants how they knew they were successful in teaching and the source to which they attributed this success. Most participants mentioned experiencing a change in their teaching self-efficacy over time, attributing their improvement to the BTS program, to mastery experiences, and social persuasions.

Some participants said that their teaching self-efficacy improved directly due to participating in the BTS program. For example, Kepi described a specific activity that occurred during some of the monthly mentor meetings where A.S.N. (as the lab coordinator) and other faculty mentors guided participants through role-playing exercises for GTAs to practice answering students’ questions on various topics, including grading concerns, conflicts with lab members, and struggling with lab content. Kepi said,

The last couple of sessions helped me more whenever the lab coordinator went to the question-and-answer session, they came up with a kind of cards with questions the lab coordinator distributed among the participants. We asked questions, we got feedback; we got the same answer to the questions from different people so we can organize ourselves, in terms of how better we can answer that question. So that kind of Q&A session helped me.

Kepi mentioned that hearing multiple perspectives on how to handle student questions was particularly helpful, emphasizing the importance of the community and having multiple mentors in the BTS program. Kepi was an experienced GTA who had been a GTA for three semesters before but still gained self-efficacy from this aspect of the BTS program.

Participants also described their teaching self-efficacy increasing due to factors other than the BTS program, such as gaining more mastery experience. For example, D.J. responded in agreement that their teaching self-efficacy had changed and said:

It [my teaching confidence] has definitely improved, however, with more experience from my first semester. When I first started teaching, I’d end the class, and I’m like, I didn't cover this topic, I could have covered that a little better. Now, with just more experience and understanding how I can prepare for my class, making an outline, or following the outlines, I'll sort of elaborate on the outlines that are given to us in the prep sessions. I feel more confident after class overall. But overall, it’s definitely increased with experience.

D.J. indicated that he gained confidence from practicing and having successful past experiences, known as mastery experiences in the sources of self-efficacy framework (23). In that framework, another source of self-efficacy is social persuasion. In interviews, this source came up in the form of feedback from students and mentors or peers. For example, Frank mentioned feeling increased confidence after receiving positive feedback from his students, saying,

I would say the reviews are a big thing. If I have a lot of students that leave very enthusiastic reviews, I think that’s a huge measure of success in my opinion. If they say, like, the TA taught me so much, and I didn't think this class would be fun until I had him as a TA. That just makes me feel so good.

Responses like these indicate that participants’ teaching self-efficacy could increase due to having more experience teaching, regardless of participating in the BTS program.

DISCUSSION

We conducted a mixed-method investigation to examine how biology graduate students benefitted from our teaching professional development program, the BTS program. Specifically, we looked for improvements in participants’ teaching self-efficacy and changes in their teaching perspectives and explored which parts of the program could be linked to these changes. Our evidence suggests that the BTS program was successful in supporting GTAs with the lowest self-efficacy. We also found that by participating in the BTS program, participants developed their views on teaching, shifting toward seeing teaching as helping learners to critically consider information.

The BTS program was successful in supporting GTAs with the lowest self-efficacy

We found that the pre-semester bootcamp, consisting of workshops on topics catered to their specific teaching assistant roles, provided a significant boost to GTAs’ teaching self-efficacy in the short term. However, these improvements did not necessarily persist throughout the semester. We did not observe any significant difference in the average teaching self-efficacy between BTS participants and non-participants at the end of the semester. However, a couple of non-participants expressed low self-efficacy, while all BTS participants expressed high teaching self-efficacy (Fig. 4).

Studies have consistently shown that GTAs require sustained support to maintain their teaching self-efficacy (4). We attempted to sustain engagement through monthly mentoring meetings and reflective peer teaching observation, but our data suggest that more intensive engagement may be necessary.

In interviews, participants described gaining teaching self-efficacy from experience teaching rather than BTS per se. This may explain why we did not observe a difference in self-efficacy at the end of the semester between participants and non-participants. However, teaching experience takes time, and one goal of the BTS program was to provide support before their first day for brand-new GTAs. The boost in self-efficacy immediately following the bootcamp and the increase in the lowest self-efficacy scores suggest that the BTS program was successful in this goal.

BTS participants shifted toward the social reform teaching perspective

We found that BTS participants shifted toward the social reform perspective over the course of the semester (Fig. 1) and more strongly endorsed the social reform perspective at the end of the semester than their peers who did not participate in the BTS program (Fig. 3). According to the social reform perspective, effective teaching helps students to critically consider information, including the history of the information, what information may or may not be included, and what purposes the knowledge is created for. None of the topics covered in the BTS program explicitly taught about the social reform teaching perspective. However, we did encourage participants to reflect on their teaching, their goals for teaching, and how their teaching actions and goals align (e.g., by writing a teaching philosophy statement and a reflection on a peer teaching observation). By engaging in these reflective processes, participants solidified and strengthened their perspectives on teaching in ways that their non-participant peers did not. Other teaching professional development programs have also reported shifts in teaching perspectives and increasing social reform perspectives in particular. For example, the University of California, Davis, Teacher Scholars program demonstrated shifts in teaching perspectives among medical educators. Participants from that program reported moving toward learner-centric approaches while teaching medical curricula, including having developed a “global perspective” about teaching and its impact beyond the classroom. An emphasis on global impact relates closely to the social reform perspective (29). Another study conducted among faculty participating in the University of British Columbia Faculty Certificate Program on Teaching and Learning in Higher Education observed a significant increase in the number of faculty who endorsed a social reform perspective after completing the certification and who attributed this change to workshop discussions that increased faculty awareness about social contexts among their students (30). Thus, there is growing evidence of a general trend of instructors shifting toward the social reform perspective through professional development. Further research should investigate the mechanisms underlying this trend.

Future directions for the BTS program

We found that the BTS program was potentially most beneficial for participants who came in with the lowest teaching self-efficacy, which our survey responses indicate are novice GTAs (n = 6 out of 19 respondents) who are international students (n = 5 out of 19 respondents). Thus, we have decided to expand the program to focus on novice GTAs assigned to teach various biology labs, beyond only introductory biology, and to cover a variety of teaching assignments, including discussion sections, lecture GTAs, and online labs.

We will also revise the program to provide extended support to GTAs to help maintain higher teaching self-efficacy throughout the semester. We will establish cohort groups led by cohort leaders to add additional near-peer mentoring support. Penman et al. (31) describe the applicability of near-peer mentoring among health professionals where more experienced peers can help model various pedagogical techniques and improve outcomes among novices. Cohort leaders will be peer GTAs from the department with teaching experience in biology labs and/or prior participants in the pilot BTS program. We will group together participants with the same type of teaching assignments (e.g., in-person lab, online, and lecture GTA) so that GTAs with shared experiences can support each other and mentors can customize their support to groups facing similar challenges. For example, GTAs teaching non-major biology labs would be placed in the same cohort together and could discuss the unique experiences of teaching and engaging non-major students.

We will also revise our approach to monthly mentor meetings to foster a stronger sense of community. We will have smaller group meetings among cohorts, led by cohort leaders, to enable the creation of a tight-knit community and to discuss relevant and specialized topics, creating personalized support (32, 33).

Lastly, we will also investigate the impact of the program on students taught by BTS participants, examining undergraduate educational and affective outcomes to determine further-reaching implications of the Biology Teacher-Scholars program.

ETHICS APPROVAL

All study procedures were reviewed and determined exempt by the Texas Tech University Institutional Review Board (IRB2022-663).

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

The following material is available online at https://doi.org/10.1128/jmbe.00008-25.

Supplementary Materials_Navlekaretal_BTS Year1. jmbe.00008-25-s0001.pdf.

Details about the Biology Teacher Scholar program components, surveys completed by participants, detailed codebook and references used in the supplementary materials.

ASM does not own the copyrights to Supplemental Material that may be linked to, or accessed through, an article. The authors have granted ASM a non-exclusive, world-wide license to publish the Supplemental Material files. Please contact the corresponding author directly for reuse.