Within the Physics department our LA program is particularly attentive to bringing up issues of systemic inequity and encouraging collaborative relationships between all of our LAs and faculty (e.g., through our weekly prep sessions that show up in the video). In our new project we're adding a couple layers of training/support for faculty before we give them extended funding to work with LAs and do course redesigns, including teaching-focused workshop and department self-assessments where we act as consultants and collect/analyze/share student data by request.

While we certainly try to involve administrators in conversations and keep them up to date about what we are doing, at this point I would say our primary focus is on working with faculty (individually and in groups) and helping them to collaborate effectively with students. Our theory of change assumes that faculty themselves, particularly department-specific groups of faculty, will be the best at determining and advocating for the ways they want STEM instruction to look at our institution. As such our long term plan is to help grow and sustain a strong community of STEM faculty who work with us and advocate for the institutional changes they want to see. 

Thanks for your questions!

The LA model is highly scalable, and the national Learning Assistant Alliance runs conferences and workshops to support instructors /departments who have LA Programs or are interested in implementing them. The Learning Assistant model has been implemented at around 200 institutions world-wide, and programs range in scale from just a few LAs to hundreds each semester. For example, at University of Colorado-Boulder, they hire over 400 LAs each year, and LAs work in about 15 departments. The Learning Assistant Alliance has resources on their website:  https://learningassistantalliance.org/ -- all resources are freely available. For institutions or departments interested in starting an LA program, I would recommend starting by attending a Regional Workshop or a National Learning Assistant Conference if possible, preferably with a team of interested folks.

LAs impact other students in many ways, so we have many different possible measures to look at. One of the most common measurements is to look at changes in DFW rates (the percentage of students who receive a grade of D or F, or who Withdraw from the course) -- STEM gateway courses commonly have DFW rates between 35% and 50%. LA programs can often cut that rate in half. One recent study looks at the relationship between LA support and equity of DFW rates across race and gender. Various measures can be used to compare student learning in LA-supported sections of courses to that of students in sections of the same courses without LA support. At CU Boulder they have found that students who take an LA-supported course also go on to earn higher grades in future courses. These are some of the most common approaches to assessing impact.

Thanks for pointing me toward resources and your suggestions, Eleanor. Wonderful to learn about this, thank you so much!

Each of our 2-hour weekly LA prep sessions in Physics include time for faculty-student and student-student dialogue about a specific aspect of teaching, learning and (in)equity in STEM, as well as student-focused announcements and focused preparation to teach specific course content. Students are highly vocal in these sessions, which provides opportunities for our faculty to learn. Our faculty also receive some faculty-only training outside of these weekly prep sessions that focus on helping them to build a shared vision around the value of collaborating with and listening to students, which will be more true on this larger project. In Physics we have found that these things together contribute to healthy teaching partnerships and as well as a healthy overall department climate. Our faculty tend to be highly attentive to collaborating with LAs in the classroom when facilitating small group work among students, and several faculty have carved out time for the LAs to lead the class themselves during pre-determined activity. The Biology prep sessions are very new and still evolving, but share similar characteristics.

Thanks!  We are privileged to work at an institution with a diverse and inspiring student body, so we are excited to see this work play out. 

Dear Lisa,

Excellent question. We are examining students' future salary earnings, college loan debt levels, unemployment rate, and possibly industry they enter post graduation. 

BTW, your project looks really interesting!

Thanks for your comment! Having more advanced students on the instructional team (as LAs) has been hugely beneficial, for the students and also for the faculty and the LAs. Among other benefits, it gives students just out of intro sequence opportunities to get to know students ahead of them in the major as they LA together. 

Here at TXST, we first implemented an LA program in 2012, then gradually expanded into all sections of all three courses in the introductory sequence for physical science and engineering majors (“calculus-based”). One of the initial challenges was supporting instructors in changing their teaching methods – it’s effort-intensive to overhaul a course. For the first few years, the department was able to offer a course release to faculty during the semester they switched to LA-supported interactive instructional methods. Now that we have reached a steady-state, we have systems in place to provide continuing support to both new and experienced faculty, including pre-semester workshops and weekly check-in meetings of faculty teams.

It is also an ongoing challenge to get student buy-in, since the kind of interactions and learning we expect of them in class are somewhat counter-cultural in STEM. One of the ways LAs can support introductory students is by helping them manage the vulnerability of working through difficult concepts with (and in front of) their peers – LAs can normalize the struggle and reassure students that feeling confused is often a sign of learning, not an indication that they are failing.

We do! One of the three research strands in this project focuses on communities of practice among faculty and LAs. This builds on our current research on the impact on LAs themselves of participation in our existing Physics LA Program. My primary focus in this research has been on LAs’ development of positive physics identity, using a theoretical framework drawn from Communities of Practice theory and from quantitative work done by Hazari et al. We have found that LAs have a strong sense of belonging to a supportive and collaborative community, and that they develop increased confidence in both their physics knowledge and their ability to learn new content and succeed in difficult coursework. They regularly reflect on the practice they received in our weekly preparation sessions on understanding and working with many different ways of approaching physics questions, and how that helped them deepen their own understanding. They often describe learning to “LA themselves” while working on challenging assignments.

In a separate identity study focused on successful physics majors with multiple minoritized identities (women of color and LGBTQ+ women), our interviewees described the LA program as a critical support, both in the experiences they had as LAs themselves and in the impact the program has on the overall sense of collaboration and mutual support among the majors in upper-division courses.

We are excited to see how LAs in courses re-designed by our faculty-student teams experience the program and how it impacts their academic trajectories and their STEM identities.

Dear Megan,

Thank you for your question. That is an excellent question. We have three research strands in this project. We are collecting student level qualitative data through survey instruments and focus group. We also conduct secondary analysis using quantitative data through our institutional data office. These datasets will help us to examine the impact of classroom transformation before and after the instructional change has been implemented.

We also use several different institutional-level data to examine student’s workforce outcomes for the Learning Assistant Model adopting institutions. We also plan on using student-level data in state of Texas to track students once they enter the workforce. These long-term outcomes will take longer to track and are hard to track.

We are happy to hear what prior success your team has had in terms of using any specific tools to track student participants.

Li

That's exciting! Here at TXST we switched to entirely remote instruction after spring break, and the LAs have been a huge help in keeping our intro physics courses interactive. We were told a few days before break that we would be going online for at least a few weeks, so we were able to work out some logistical issues ahead of time, and to meet with our LAs and practice break-out rooms and virtual collaboration skills. The majority of our LAs applied to be in the program again Fall semester, so I think the experience was overall positive for them.

We have found that it's challenging to get discussion going in even small synchronous sessions, as you have also experienced -- but once students are in break-out rooms with three or four peers, the conversations seem to come more easily. The Learning Assistant Alliance has some resources available on using LAs in e-Learning, pulled together this spring, and I expect the resources will become more comprehensive as we all continue this instructional adventure.

Hi Renee! Thanks for your questions. I don't have anything substantive to add to what Eleanor said, but would be happy to chat on Zoom (where else?) at some point over the summer if that seems like it would be useful.