What Should Graduate Teaching Assistants Know about Teaching?

This article reports results of a content analysis of 18 teaching assistant (TA) manuals. Topics were divided into four major categories of tasks: professional socialization, intellectual, interpersonal, and organizational. Twenty-six of the 103 topics identified were included in more than 50% of the manuals. Among the common topics, more topics were included from the categories dealing with intellectual and interpersonal tasks than from the other two categories, highlighting the importance of these two dimensions of effective teaching, which is consistent with Lowman's (1984) theoretical model. The topic outline provided by our study could serve as a model for TA manuals.