Q&A Buddy

Q&A Buddy

Q&A Buddy explores the metacognitive skill of help-giving, and how we can best support TA/PMs in their job to give high-quality help to students during office hours. We are creating a tool that aims to help TA/PMs recognize flawed actions and beliefs, specifically how these actions/beliefs misalign with the reasons they wanted to tutor in the first place. To do this, we help TA/PMs gain a deeper understanding of what flawed actions and beliefs look like, and how they could replace these with more productive practices and ideologies. Using our reflection prototype spreadsheet and pre-written database, we're able to account for different common situations TA/PMs find themselves in during office hours. We are finding with our current model that some TA/PMs are able to recognize their misalignments, however, there is still more work to be done to improve the quality of the user experience. In short, this project aims to help TA/PMs give 'just enough help' to their students and discourage them from being 'over-helpers' or 'answer-givers'.

Q&A Buddy image 1

Figure 1: The conceptual diagram of the issue at hand - how goals might not be aligned with the beliefs-strategies-actions-outcomes side of things.

Team

Faculty

  • Haoqi Zhang
  • Eleanor "Nell" O'Rourke

Ph.D. Students

  • 🎓 Harrison Kwik

Masters and Undergraduate Students

  • Spencer Arch Silverstein ("Archie")
  • 🎓 Iphigenie Bera
  • 🎓 Li Kang Tan