Graduate Teaching Assistants: Ethical Training, Beliefs, and Practices

This study assessed several ethical issues and judgments facing graduate teaching assistants (GTAs). Psychology GTAs judged the ethics of a number of teaching-related behaviors and rated how frequently they practiced those behaviors. Judgments of how ethical GTAs believed various behaviors to be, and the frequency with which they engaged in them, varied somewhat based on age, gender, training, and other factors. Moreover, several discrepancies were found between ethical judgments and practice. For example, most GTAs judged it unethical to teach without adequate preparation and to ignore unethical behavior of faculty, but most reported practicing these behaviors at least on occasion. These data highlight the risk for unethical behavior among GTAs and the lack of preparation for dealing with that risk.

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