Interrelation between Teaching Assistants’ debugging strategies and adherence to sound tutoring practices during office hours

Office hours often play an important role in Computer Science courses. But office hours are often conducted primarily by graduate and undergraduate Teaching Assistants (TAs). These TAs may have limited experience with both debugging issues that students may encounter in their code, and with utilizing good tutoring practices when guiding the student toward a solution. In order to understand TAs’ challenges and strategies during office hours, we conducted an observational study of TAs holding office hours for a Data Oriented programming course. We found that TAs tend to use fewer good tutoring practices in help sessions where they’ve encountered more difficulty with debugging the student code. We also identified three dimensions of debugging strategies where the TA’s choices may either exacerbate or alleviate the difficulty they have with both debugging and guiding the student. We believe that these insights can help inform the design of tools and interventions to help TAs conduct more effective office hours.