United States

The Learning Assistant (LA) program is designed to encourage the transformation of courses to incorporate more evidence-based pedagogical practices. The LA pedagogy course is one of the three central components of the program and diversely implemented across institutions with LA programs. The purpose of this study is to identify and compare the choices made by instructors regarding the composition of the LA pedagogy course at two different institutions -- one being a small, historically-women’s, liberal-arts college and the other a large research university. To gather data, interviews were conducted with the LA pedagogy course instructor at each institution. These interviews show that instructors adapt the LA pedagogy course to their institutions in different ways, and that fostering relationship-building is an important factor for instructors as they decide how to design and teach their local pedagogy course. In describing the varied ways in which instructors implement the LA pedagogy course and the motivations behind those choices, this study could help guide different institutions when implementing their own pedagogy course.

PERC SM 21

An investigation of how instructors choose to implement the Learning Assistant (LA) pedagogy course and their motivations

qualitative methods

instructor motivations

pedagogy course

learning assistants

**Making Physics More Inclusive and Eliminating Exclusionary Practices in Physics**

As a gateway discipline to STEM majors and careers, physics plays a central role in deciding who does, and who doesn't, get to discover and pursue scientific careers. Technical and scientific professionals are rewarded with economic privilege and status which affords them both social and cultural power. Therefore, social justice will be realized only when the opportunity, and the choice, to excel in physics is open to all students. The culture and practices of the physics classroom reflect the culture of physics at large, which raises the question of how our professional physics communities can embrace, rather than inadvertently repel, a diverse group of academics that can help improve physics culture.  To this end, the 2021 Physics Education Research Conference will focus on defining inclusive spaces and practices. Additionally, we will explore strategies for eliminating exclusionary practices in our classrooms, research spaces, and professional organizations. We call on the community to propose sessions that will drive conversations related to these initiatives throughout PERC 2021.

Please download the full program [here. ](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TRMC_SYJ3PUqXyP7sskA7LRSA8ow0eRE/view?usp=sharing)

August 4, 2021 - August 5, 2021 in a Virtual Conference Format

Making Physics More Inclusive and Eliminating Exclusionary Practices in Physics

poster

Recent studies have begun to explore the connection between physics identity development and career skill development with the facilitation of informal physics programs by our students. Informal physics programs, or outreach programs, provide pathways for less structured, voluntary engagement with the field, beyond the formal spaces of a classroom or laboratory, where students can explore their passions within the field. This work narrows the focus of a prior study to explore the differences in experiences between graduate and undergraduate students who facilitated at least one of five outreach programs at a large, public, land grant university. Results from this work may help inform departmental efforts regarding retention, inclusion, and structures to promote skill development beyond the classroom.

Comparing the impact of informal physics program on undergraduate versus graduate student facilitators

At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, undergraduate Learning Assistants (LAs) are utilized to support course reforms in introductory physics labs. These LAs are previous students from the course who act as classroom aides and assistants alongside a graduate teaching assistant in our reformed physics labs. In two sets of interviews with LAs, we seek to better understand the motivations of LAs and why they choose to volunteer as instructors. We also probe the skills that LAs develop during their training and how their own experience as students in the course may affect their approach to instruction. Using our understanding of these aspects of the LA experience, we hope to improve our LA program by adapting our LA training to teach skills and practices that LAs find useful in the classroom.

Studying the Learning Assistant Experience at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Teachers who have only one year to instruct students often pay attention to and take intoaccount not only what their students have learned before, but what they will be studyingnext. To do so, a teacher must know the content beyond what they are teaching, allow-ing them to see how the content of their classroom is connected with preceding and latertopics in physics and areas outside of physics. Horizon Content Knowledge (HCK) is acomponent of teacher knowledge that emphasizes the structure and interconnectedness of adiscipline, the validity of a teachers content knowledge, and the values and sensibilities theteacher has about the discipline they are teaching. Given a particular location of instruc-tion, HCK enables a teacher to integrate content knowledge found in the larger landscape oftheir discipline. To investigate HCK in physics, we have interviewed in-service middle/highschool teachers about topics in physics. Preliminary data provide several examples of HCKin physics. Furthermore, we find evidence of an interdisciplinary horizon, which is howteachers incorporate interdisciplinary knowledge in the context of their current location ofinstruction. We find that interdisciplinary content, values, and validity of knowledge play a role in unifying physics concepts for these teachers while also influencing their teaching of physics.

Horizon Content Knowledge and the Interdisciplinary Horizon in Physics Education Research

Informal learning environments often have a clear ambition to spark interest [1]. People also need multiple exposures to content [2, 3] to learn. The Dome+ model was developed to guide the Big Astronomy Project, a planetarium show and additional resources, to help support audiences in extending engagement beyond the physical space of the planetarium show. A main design principle was sparking interest through the immersive environment of the show. The Big Astronomy Project released the show as a YouTube 360? stream rather than in domes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Here we test the utility of the four-phase interest model [4] for characterizing interest surrounding the planetarium for use in our larger dataset. The four-phase model suggests people progress from earlier phases of situational interest induced by the environment to later phases of individual interest marked by self-driven engagement. We use this model to characterize the role the show plays in audience interest and, more importantly, look for the role of interest in a virtual environment. For our test, we used focus groups with audience members on our premiere day of the planetarium show consisting of eight individuals, and included follow-up interviews with five of those individuals to understand how they continued their engagement with Big Astronomy. Everyone indicated that they chose to come to the show because of an established interest in astronomy. Since self-induced engagement is an aspect of phases 3 and 4, we placed all participants in phases 3 to 4. Our data lacked people who fell into the situational interest phases. We suggest that the essence of virtual learning will attract individuals who have an individual interest. We plan to use this research as a tool for the analysis of the larger dataset that includes a more diverse set of individuals.

Developing a tool to measure interest in audiences of a virtual planetarium show

Teachers in the United States rate their lives better than all other occupation groups, trailing only physicians. However, as a nation we face a shortage of qualified math and science teachers. Because students often turn to faculty members for career advice, it is important that faculty hold accurate and positive perceptions of grade 7-12 math and science teaching. To help identify faculty perceptions of the teaching career, an instrument known as the Perceptions of Teaching as a Profession in Higher Education (PTaP.HE) (Pronounced P-Taffy) was developed. In this work a reduced-basis factor analysis was performed on the PTaP.HE and eight underlying factors were identified. These factors provide insight into faculty thinking about grade 7-12 teaching. When survey data are analyzed by these underlying factors, it is found that faculty perceive themselves and their departments as supportive of those who want to pursue grade 7-12 math or science teaching. However, their perceptions of grade 7-12 math and science teaching are sometimes internally inconsistent, with some perceptions being positive and others negative. This work highlights the importance of sharing accurate information about the teaching career with faculty members, so they can in turn share accurate information with their students.

Faculty perceptions of grade 7-12 math and science teaching as a career: Evidence from a reduced-basis factor analysis of the PTAP.HE Instrument

“The Hobby-Eberly Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) will find over one million galaxies that are 9 billion to 11 billion light-years away, and will yield the largest map of the universe ever produced. Over the past year, I have used Zooniverse, the worlds largest citizen science platform, to train participants all over the world to efficiently classify these galaxies. The map will allow us to measure how fast the universe was expanding at different times in its history. Changes in the expansion rate will reveal the role of dark energy at different epochs, but the most difficult task is determining which galaxies come from our epoch of interest (at z~2-3) and which ones are nearby. These one million sources require visual classification for the most accurate results, an amount not feasible to handle from within the collaboration. The project, Dark Energy Explorers, has been live for 3 months and we have already had over 1.5 million classifications. I will discuss the methods we have used and how citizen science can be applied to big data astronomy and how we have preliminarily applied machine learning."

Power of the people: Using citizen science to power big data astronomy

Learning Assistants (LAs) are increasingly used in classrooms all over the globe, where LAs help teach in a variety of student-centered, active-learning environments. The LA Model consists of three core components: the LA pedagogy course, weekly preparatory meetings with the instructional team, and the actual LA teaching practice of working with small groups of students. In this paper we utilize an existing framework of essential pedagogy principles identified by Top \textit{et al}.\ to develop a methodology for comparing what LAs learn in the pedagogy course to what they do in their LA practice. We apply the methodology to audio recordings of ten different LAs facilitating student discussion in five separate sections of an approximately 400 person, introductory studio physics course. We compare the degree to which LAs incorporate key concepts from the pedagogy class and propose ways to utilize our methodology to enhance the implementation of the LA Model.

Pedagogy in practice: exploring the use of pedagogy course knowledge by learning assistants

Learning Assistants are undergraduate peer educators that help facilitate learning in a university classroom environment. According to Jardine (2019), Learning Assistant feedback to faculty roughly falls into three categories: course logistics, student behavior, and student understanding. Her work also defined the roles that Learning Assistants assume: students, informants, consultants, co-instructors, or co-creators. We built from this previous work by characterizing the feedback given to faculty by Learning Assistants and found connections between Learning Assistant roles and the feedback. Using video from interviews with Learning Assistants and faculty working with Learning Assistants, we created a two-dimensional preliminary framework for the feedback and roles assumed by Learning Assistants in order to explore the relationship between the two.

Developing a framework to characterize the feedback that Learning Assistants give to faculty

Understanding how experienced and novice teachers learn in the context of professional development can help us develop a supportive community of practice. However, the nature of teachers’ learning conceptualized as meaning making processes using in-depth data analysis and robust theoretical frameworks is still understudied. In this study, the learning processes of two high school physics teachers— one expert and one novice—were reviewed as they participated in the Illinois Physics and Secondary Schools (IPaSS) partnership program in summer 2020. Positioning theory was used as a lens to unpack teachers’ discussion on conceptual reasoning about energy in paired collaborative work. The analysis was validated and augmented by individual video-stimulated recall interviews, during which each teacher shared her perspective on the interactions that took place during the collaborative work. Preliminary results revealed two main storylines from the interactions of these two teachers: 1) the experienced teacher’s self-positioning as a learner, and 2) the novice teacher’s openness to learn, which established rapport and created a space where both felt comfortable sharing their ideas and expressing uncertainty, enabling them to collaborate productively and support each other’s professional development.

Expert-Novice Teacher Interactions in a Professional Development Partnership Program

San Francisco State University (SFSU), a large Hispanic-serving institution, launched a Learning Assistant (LA) program in Spring 2017, including introductory physics, astronomy, and chemistry courses, with plans to expand to math and computer science. Like many LA programs, we aim to transform large, traditionally lecture-based introductory STEM courses to a more active and inclusive learning environment through the addition of undergraduate facilitators working in concert with course instructors. At SFSU, LAs receive upper-division elective credits to participate in a weekly pedagogy course with targeted readings, discussions, and reflection essays on teaching practices, plus a weekly prep session with their mentor (the course instructor), where they discuss specific activities to be implemented in the classroom. Several studies have shown content and affective gains for students in courses with LAs and for LAs. As our LA program has grown to include more courses, instructors, and LAs, we have been collecting interviews with LAs and faculty as well as reflection essays from the pedagogy course to gain insight regarding implementation challenges and benefits, dynamics between faculty, LAs, and students, and the general experience of the LAs and their faculty mentors. We have iteratively coded responses to interview questions and essays and tallied frequency counts of emergent themes. These results will give insight into the effects of the LA program being implemented for the first time at San Francisco State University. Results will inform the continuation and expansion of the LA program in the College of Science and Engineering.

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An investigation of how instructors choose to implement the Learning Assistant (LA) pedagogy course and their motivations

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Comparing the impact of informal physics program on undergraduate versus graduate student facilitators

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