- Jianlan Wang
- Associate professor
- Presenter’s NSFRESOURCECENTERS
- Texas Tech University
- Stephanie Hart
- Director, Texas Tech OnRamps
- Presenter’s NSFRESOURCECENTERS
- Texas Tech University
- Beth Thacker
- Associate professor
- Presenter’s NSFRESOURCECENTERS
- Texas Tech University
- Kyle Wipfli
- Research Assistant
- Presenter’s NSFRESOURCECENTERS
- Texas Tech University
Measuring and improving pedagogical content knowledge of student assistants i...
NSF Awards: 1838339
2022 (see original presentation & discussion)
Undergraduate
Questioning is an important strategy for teachers to assess and scaffold student learning in STEM education. In an inquiry-oriented setting, a salient feature of questioning is that questions in a chain consecutively guide students to expand their knowledge schema from their exploration. This pedagogical strategy is challenging to novice STEM educators like undergraduate Learning Assistants (LA). In this project, our goal is to develop a written instrument to measure LAs’ competencies of questioning and examine how their questioning affects student learning. We adapt the framework of Pedagogical Content Knowledge in the context of Questioning (PCK-Q) to describe LAs’ competencies.
In this video, we will present sample questions of the written instrument that reflect common scenarios LAs encounter while teaching college physics. In the questions, LAs analyze given scenarios and determine how they would proceed with teaching. We will present samples of free-response and Likert-scale versions of the questions and discuss their strengths and limits. We will briefly summarize the rubric to derive LAs’ PCK-Q from the perspectives of their orientation toward questioning, content knowledge, knowledge of students, and knowledge of appropriate responses.
In addition, we will present the steps of developing the instruments from videos of LAs’ class interaction with students. We will share key tenets in this procedure that can be applied to other STEM disciplines. We will discuss the challenges and difficulties that we have encountered in this process. Finally, we will propose possible collaboration between our research team and STEM educators who are interested in this project.
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Christine Royce
Professor
I absolutely agree that the use of questioning in lessons is of the utmost importance! Furthermore, the ability to have knowledgeable learning assistants within the classroom allows for more individualized attention. An instrument would be helpful for others to try and replicate this type of instructional strategy within the classroom.
Jianlan Wang
Associate professor
Thanks, that's what we have been working on.
Christine Royce
Professor
That is wonderful to hear. Helping teachers recognize how best to meet many students needs will be a positive aspect. Thank you for sharing the ideas.
Jianlan Wang
Associate professor
Thanks.
Nancy Hopkins-Evans
Senior Director
I really enjoyed excellent use of video to show the classroom perspective, LA's and the progress of the project making it easy to follow the research rationale and design. I do have a few questions a few based on the video. What is the role of the instructor in this research? Are they there to support the LA's? Do you think it would be possible to use a similar approach in middle and high school classrooms with a focus solely on the teacher as there is probably not an option to have additional adults in the classroom to reduce the student/teacher ratio. How are the LA's funded? Is there an expectation that the University might adopt this approach to improve learning outcomes for students.
Jianlan Wang
Associate professor
Thanks, below are my answers to your questions:
1) The instructor is part of the instructional team who rotates among groups as well. Compared to LAs, the instructor is more knowledgeable in physics and more experienced in inquiry-oriented pedagogies.
2) Yes, definitely possible. Actually, I have also been working on the elementary version of the instrument and applying it in the assessment and preparation of elementary pre-service teachers' questioning skills. This work was delayed by COVID, but papers will come out soon.
3) There are different sources of funding. Typically, LAs are funded by the department. I cannot speak for other institutions. At Texas Tech University, there are other STEM departments (e.g., biology) that have incorporated LAs in their courses.
Anna Suarez
President
What experiences/training does the project provide beyond the teaching scenarios to develop LA's pedagogical knowledge?
Jianlan Wang
Associate professor
The LAs had taken the course already so they were familiar with the curriculum and instructional approach. They also attended weekly preparation sessions that targeted physics content knowledge and pedagogical discussion.
Anna Suarez
President
How is the project using information from the weekly prep sessions and targeted content and pedagogical discussions to adapt the scales developed and adapt the support provided to the LAs?
It is terrific that you are interested in partnering with other faculty/projects to possibly use the tools developed. What type of faculty/project partner would be ideal for your next step?
Jianlan Wang
Associate professor
Different PCK-Q questions were administered in weekly prep sessions in alignment with the content of course instruction. Those questions were embedded in different concepts. For example, the PCK-Q question for Week 1 prep session was about Coulumb's law. LAs' answers to that question were not closely related to the question for Week 2 prep session about Electric potential. Thus, the information from one weekly prep session may be of more help to the adaptation of support for future LAs when the same content is taught.
We would love to collaborate with educators from other STEM disciplines about adopting our methodology to develop similar instruments in different domains. For research purposes, we would like to have PER scholars from other institutions with LA programs help us further validate our instruments. We need a larger sample size of LAs.
Lauren Bauman
Thank you for sharing your work! I'm curious how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted your work? The timeline in your video shows that you did a lot of observation pre-pandemic, which informed the questions you developed. It also looks like you continued developing, testing, and refining the questions during the pandemic. Did you notice LA's approach to questioning students and the skills they employed to do so change if they were in-person versus online?
Jianlan Wang
Associate professor
The COVID pandemic has impacted our data collection because it was more difficult to track LA-student interaction after a course was moved online via zoom. The dynamic of class interaction was also impacted. Hands-on labs were replaced with virtual labs like simulations from Phet. Students communicated with group members less and sought help from LAs more. LAs used direct instruction more frequently in their response to students. When they provided guidance through questioning, they referred to lab data less frequently compared to the face-to-face setting.
Further posting is closed as the event has ended.