Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2019
Volume 64, Number 3
Saturday–Tuesday, April 13–16, 2019; Denver, Colorado
Session Y07: Excellence in Physics Education Award: The Learning Assistants AllianceDiversity Education Invited Undergraduate
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Sponsoring Units: FEd Chair: Laurie McNeil, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Room: Sheraton Governor's Square 16 |
Tuesday, April 16, 2019 1:30PM - 2:06PM |
Y07.00001: The Learning Assistant Model for Building Equitable Learning Environments Invited Speaker: Valerie K Otero The Learning Assistant (LA) model began at CU Boulder in 2001, with 4 LAs to support one section of Introductory Astronomy. Since then, the program has grown, with 100+ faculty members each year working with 410 LAs in 14 departments in 4 colleges and schools, impacting approximately 20,000 students on campus annually. Through a brief, peer-reviewed application process, professors are awarded LAs to help them make small to large changes to their courses. LAs encourage active student engagement in the classroom, guide students in navigating large amounts of material, provide feedback to students as they work through complex problems, offer study tips, and help motivate students to persist. They also take a pedagogy course that offers practical techniques and research on learning and instruction. Through this process, students, their professors, and the LAs become more attuned to research-based strategies for teaching physics and to the complexities of building equitable learning environments that lead to student success. We will discuss the history of the LA program on campus and in the physics department specifically, providing data to support claims about its impacts on student learning, DWF rates, teacher preparation, and students from groups traditionally underrepresented in physics. We will conclude with conjectures about mechanisms that lead to these impacts. |
Tuesday, April 16, 2019 2:06PM - 2:42PM |
Y07.00002: The Learning Assistant Alliance for Supporting a Diversity of Institutions, Faculty, and Students Invited Speaker: Laurie Langdon The International Learning Assistant Alliance has emerged as a group of 1200+ faculty, administrators, and professional society representatives throughout the world, concerned about improving educational conditions for a diverse student population through the use of LAs. Organizations such as APS, PhysTEC, HHMI, and NSF have been instrumental in initiating and expanding the LA Alliance that now reaches over 200 institutions across the U.S. and other countries including Japan, Ireland, Norway, and Turkey. The recently-established LA Alliance Leadership Council runs one international conference in Boulder each year, and multiple regional workshops throughout the nation. In addition to highlighting the history and broader impacts of the LA Alliance, we will discuss the tools that are available through the LA Alliance, including the LA Campus management and longitudinal data system, the Learning About STEM Student Outcomes (LASSO) automated assessment system, and Resources such as videos, manuals, pedagogy course materials, and ways to use LAs. |
Tuesday, April 16, 2019 2:42PM - 3:18PM |
Y07.00003: Leveraging student expertise in the Learning Assistant (LA) Model: The importance of understanding diverse LA and Instructor Partnerships Invited Speaker: Mel S Sabella Discipline-based Education Research has provided the STEM college community with tools to assess learning, details on the state of student knowledge, and instructional materials that have shown to be effective in promoting understanding. While this work has had a major impact on instruction, the majority of this work has been done at R1, primarily white universities. Our work on understanding student learning and implementing instructional reform at a predominantly black institution, has highlighted specific strengths in our STEM community. These efforts suggest that involving students as collaborators in developing effective and inclusive learning spaces has far-reaching benefits for both students and instructors. The Learning Assistant (LA) Model (Otero et al., 2006) provides opportunities where student voice is valued and rich teaching partnerships can develop between LAs and instructors. The Model provides the potential for LAs to take up power and responsibility and allows us to leverage the expertise of diverse students. We describe different LA-faculty partnerships and provide examples of how LAs can be invited, as collaborators, where they are integral participants in instructional design. We show that involvement in these partnerships is important to LAs feeling like valued members, rather than guests, in learning and teaching communities. We draw on the framework of “rightful presence” (Calabrese-Barton & Tan, 2017), used to understand equity-oriented teaching, as a useful lens in analyzing collaborative partnerships in the LA Model, that welcome co-thinking between LAs and instructors, on how best to support all learners. |
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