Development of pedagogical knowledge among learning assistants

Abstract

Background: Successful outcomes of the Learning Assistant (LA) model include increased learning outcomes in STEM gateway courses and increased persistence to graduation among LAs and the students they serve. While there are many possible reasons that the LA program is effective, the pedagogical development of the LAs themselves has not yet been systematically studied. The research reported here investigated how deeply first-time LAs enrolled in a one-semester pedagogy course took up the language associated with the course's essential pedagogical principles. By reviewing prior research as well as assessing our target population and our pedagogy course learning goals, we developed a set of three essential pedagogical principles that are critical for effective classroom instruction and developed a coding scheme for identifying these principles in LAs' written work. We then looked at LA's development of language with respect to these principles by analyzing weekly teaching reflections submitted by LAs during five iterations of our pedagogy course.

Results: Our research indicated that the language used to introduce particular pedagogical principles might play an important role in initiating LAs' uptake of these concepts.We found that LAs began to develop an understanding of the language that values students' prior ideas in learning, but the depth of this understanding varied. In addition, LAs did not demonstrate as much growth in their language with respect to the formative assessment or to the idea that students play a role in constructing knowledge.

Conclusions: In developing a pedagogy course for LAs, relating to their prior backgrounds in STEM appears to be critical. Using language that is accessible seems to increase LAs' ability to develop pedagogical principles. Although LAs' development of language related to the essential pedagogical principles is small, it may be enough to allow them to create contexts that facilitate learning.

Keywords: Course reform; Course transformation; Formative assessment; Knowledge construction; LA; Learning assistant; Misconceptions; Pedagogy; Students’ ideas.

Fig. 1

First stage of the light experiment. Experimental set-up from which LAs make predictions (a), observation of complex shadow, different from the sharp square image that LAs typically predict (b)

Fig. 2

Second stage of light experiment. Observation using pedagogical tools: one Mini-Maglite™ (a), two Mini-Maglites™ (b), and three Mini-Maglites™ (c)

Fig. 3

Averaged overall major codes. The percentage of responses that were coded as student ideas, constructing knowledge, and formative assessment and averaged across five semesters. Week 2 responses are shown in solid gray, while week 15 responses are indicated by the striped bars

Fig. 4

Mental models term usage. Percentage of responses to the teach and learn prompts that were coded as student ideas that also contained the term “mental models”

Fig. 5

Student ideas codes by semester. Percentage of responses coded as student ideas in week 2 (solid gray bars) versus week 15 (patterned bars) from Spring 2014 through Spring 2016. These responses include both LAs’ definitions of teaching and learning

Fig. 6

Breakdown of student ideas codes. Percentage of week 15 teaching and learning responses coded as student ideas that talked about student ideas as a resource (light gray), obstacle (patterned), or simply used vocabulary (dark gray)

Fig. 7

Averaged week 15 coding percentages. Percentage of week 15 student responses coded as student ideas in conjunction with constructing knowledge and formative assessment. Note that the columns are mutually exclusive