Factors impacting teaching and research anxieties in biology graduate teaching assistants: implications for professional development.

Abstract

Graduate students in the United States are experiencing increased levels of anxiety, affecting their mental health and attrition from graduate programs. Yet, we are only beginning to understand how anxiety about specific aspects of graduate study, such as teaching or research, might contribute to this overall anxiety related to graduate study. Biology graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) often have simultaneous roles as teachers, researchers, students, and employees. The most salient roles are often as teachers and researchers, which can have different values ascribed to them by science departments, and thus generate anxiety in different ways. To explore the factors GTAs identified as impacting their anxiety specific to teaching and research, we interviewed 23 Biology GTAs at a research-intensive southeastern university. Thematic analysis of interview transcripts identified five factors associated with GTA teaching and research anxieties: fear of negative evaluation by others, fear of letting others down, low self-efficacy, research-teaching tension, and work/life pressures. Low self-efficacy was expressed more often by participants when discussing research anxiety. In contrast, the fear of letting others down (e.g., undergraduates or mentors) was expressed more often by participants when talking about teaching anxiety. These findings can be used to inform professional development or mental health interventions for GTAs to help them reduce their anxieties and encourage greater awareness and dialogue about the anxiety experiences of graduate students in the sciences broadly.