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Author: Tam'ra-Kay Alisia Francis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Engineering teachers
Languages : en
Pages : 152
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Book Description
Graduate students are responsible for much undergraduate instruction (Boyle & Boice, 1998; Luft et al., 2004; Miller, Brickman and Oliver, 2014) and need professional learning that aims to develop their pedagogical knowledge and instructional skills. The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore the influence of a pedagogy course that focuses on the implementation of evidence based instructional practices, on STEM Graduate Teaching Assistants’ (GTAs) professional science teaching identities. Guided by Thomas Guskey’s (1985) model of teacher change that relates changes in practice to changes in teachers’ attitudes and perceptions, the guiding research question and sub-questions were as follows:Are STEM GTAs' professional teaching identities influenced by participating in a science pedagogy course? 1. What are STEM GTAs' beliefs about science teaching and learning? 2. What factors nurture or inhibit the development of their teaching identities? Data sources included anonymous artifacts from 53 participants, as well as interviews and representations of professional science teacher identity models for a subset of eight volunteers. Analysis revealed that (i) the professional teaching identities of the STEM GTAs were influenced by their participation in the course, (ii) STEM GTAs' beliefs about science teaching and learning include connecting with students, academic identity/content knowledge, and cultural background, and (iii) the factors that STEM GTAs identified as nurturing or inhibiting the development of their teaching identities included pedagogical knowledge, self-efficacy, and mentoring. Conclusions that can be drawn from these findings include the following, which have implications for research and for practice: 1. Activities of professional development must recognize the interactions and influences of the multiple identities of the individual (Fritz & Smith, 2008). The exploration of a teaching identity must therefore involve the interplay of the GTA’s cultural identity and academic identity as student researcher and teacher. 2. Professional learning experiences explicitly addressing identity are valuable to STEM GTAs. Creating representations of their professional teaching identity can serve as a powerful metacognitive tool to help GTAs reflect on their instructor positionality. 3. Educational developers and departments should provide graduate students with mastery experiences and mentorship to help develop their academic self-concept and professional teaching identity.
Author: Tam'ra-Kay Alisia Francis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Engineering teachers
Languages : en
Pages : 152
Get Book Here
Book Description
Graduate students are responsible for much undergraduate instruction (Boyle & Boice, 1998; Luft et al., 2004; Miller, Brickman and Oliver, 2014) and need professional learning that aims to develop their pedagogical knowledge and instructional skills. The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore the influence of a pedagogy course that focuses on the implementation of evidence based instructional practices, on STEM Graduate Teaching Assistants’ (GTAs) professional science teaching identities. Guided by Thomas Guskey’s (1985) model of teacher change that relates changes in practice to changes in teachers’ attitudes and perceptions, the guiding research question and sub-questions were as follows:Are STEM GTAs' professional teaching identities influenced by participating in a science pedagogy course? 1. What are STEM GTAs' beliefs about science teaching and learning? 2. What factors nurture or inhibit the development of their teaching identities? Data sources included anonymous artifacts from 53 participants, as well as interviews and representations of professional science teacher identity models for a subset of eight volunteers. Analysis revealed that (i) the professional teaching identities of the STEM GTAs were influenced by their participation in the course, (ii) STEM GTAs' beliefs about science teaching and learning include connecting with students, academic identity/content knowledge, and cultural background, and (iii) the factors that STEM GTAs identified as nurturing or inhibiting the development of their teaching identities included pedagogical knowledge, self-efficacy, and mentoring. Conclusions that can be drawn from these findings include the following, which have implications for research and for practice: 1. Activities of professional development must recognize the interactions and influences of the multiple identities of the individual (Fritz & Smith, 2008). The exploration of a teaching identity must therefore involve the interplay of the GTA’s cultural identity and academic identity as student researcher and teacher. 2. Professional learning experiences explicitly addressing identity are valuable to STEM GTAs. Creating representations of their professional teaching identity can serve as a powerful metacognitive tool to help GTAs reflect on their instructor positionality. 3. Educational developers and departments should provide graduate students with mastery experiences and mentorship to help develop their academic self-concept and professional teaching identity.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004446079
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 332
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Book Description
This edited volume focuses on the reform and research of STEM education from international perspectives considering the sociocultural perspectives of different educational contexts. It shows the impact of political and cultural contexts on the reform of science education.
Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309380898
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 161
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Book Description
Students who participate in scientific research as undergraduates report gaining many benefits from the experience. However, undergraduate research done independently under a faculty member's guidance or as part of an internship, regardless of its individual benefits, is inherently limited in its overall impact. Faculty members and sponsoring companies have limited time and funding to support undergraduate researchers, and most institutions have available (or have allocated) only enough human and financial resources to involve a small fraction of their undergraduates in such experiences. Many more students can be involved as undergraduate researchers if they do scientific research either collectively or individually as part of a regularly scheduled course. Course-based research experiences have been shown to provide students with many of the same benefits acquired from a mentored summer research experience, assuming that sufficient class time is invested, and several different potential advantages. In order to further explore this issue, the Division on Earth and Life Studies and the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education organized a convocation meant to examine the efficacy of engaging large numbers of undergraduate students who are enrolled in traditional academic year courses in the life and related sciences in original research, civic engagement around scientific issues, and/or intensive study of research methods and scientific publications at both two- and four-year colleges and universities. Participants explored the benefits and costs of offering students such experiences and the ways that such efforts may both influence and be influenced by issues such as institutional governance, available resources, and professional expectations of faculty. Integrating Discovery-Based Research into the Undergraduate Curriculum summarizes the presentations and discussions from this event.
Author: Lucas Messer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Dissertations, Academic
Languages : en
Pages : 166
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Book Description
Author: Michele Marincovich
Publisher: Anker Publishing Company, Incorporated
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 344
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Book Description
This comprehensive TA training handbook is an essential resource for those who prepare graduate TAs for their responsibilities in the classroom and for their overall professional development. Written by experts in the field of TA development, this book provides a clear framework for implementing and assessing an effective program.
Author: Kelly Louise Funk
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 454
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Book Description
Author: Joel J. Mintzes
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303033600X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 989
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Book Description
This book explores evidence-based practice in college science teaching. It is grounded in disciplinary education research by practicing scientists who have chosen to take Wieman’s (2014) challenge seriously, and to investigate claims about the efficacy of alternative strategies in college science teaching. In editing this book, we have chosen to showcase outstanding cases of exemplary practice supported by solid evidence, and to include practitioners who offer models of teaching and learning that meet the high standards of the scientific disciplines. Our intention is to let these distinguished scientists speak for themselves and to offer authentic guidance to those who seek models of excellence. Our primary audience consists of the thousands of dedicated faculty and graduate students who teach undergraduate science at community and technical colleges, 4-year liberal arts institutions, comprehensive regional campuses, and flagship research universities. In keeping with Wieman’s challenge, our primary focus has been on identifying classroom practices that encourage and support meaningful learning and conceptual understanding in the natural sciences. The content is structured as follows: after an Introduction based on Constructivist Learning Theory (Section I), the practices we explore are Eliciting Ideas and Encouraging Reflection (Section II); Using Clickers to Engage Students (Section III); Supporting Peer Interaction through Small Group Activities (Section IV); Restructuring Curriculum and Instruction (Section V); Rethinking the Physical Environment (Section VI); Enhancing Understanding with Technology (Section VII), and Assessing Understanding (Section VIII). The book’s final section (IX) is devoted to Professional Issues facing college and university faculty who choose to adopt active learning in their courses. The common feature underlying all of the strategies described in this book is their emphasis on actively engaging students who seek to make sense of natural objects and events. Many of the strategies we highlight emerge from a constructivist view of learning that has gained widespread acceptance in recent years. In this view, learners make sense of the world by forging connections between new ideas and those that are part of their existing knowledge base. For most students, that knowledge base is riddled with a host of naïve notions, misconceptions and alternative conceptions they have acquired throughout their lives. To a considerable extent, the job of the teacher is to coax out these ideas; to help students understand how their ideas differ from the scientifically accepted view; to assist as students restructure and reconcile their newly acquired knowledge; and to provide opportunities for students to evaluate what they have learned and apply it in novel circumstances. Clearly, this prescription demands far more than most college and university scientists have been prepared for.
Author: Hayley Miles-Leighton Milbourne
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 374
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Book Description
Across the nation, there is increasing national interest in improving the way mathematics departments prepare their graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) because of their integral role in teaching lower division mathematics courses, particularly within the Calculus sequence (Speer, Deshler, & Ellis, 2017). While there have been several studies that look into the ways departments prepare their GTAs (Belnap & Allred, 2009; Speer, Smith, & Horvath, 2010), little is still known about how GTAs make sense of and understand the active-learning teaching practices introduced to them. In order to better support GTAs, we need to understand how GTAs are interpreting and making sense of these teaching practices. The GTAs within this study were running break-out sections twice a week for Calculus I and II, with one of the break-out sections involving the facilitation of activities and group work. GTAs engaged in a three-day pre-term seminar, a semester-long PD course on leading student-centered classes, and weekly meetings with the course coordinators. Lead TAs provided support and feedback to their fellow GTAs. Using a modified framework based on a socio-cultural learning theory, known as the Vygotsky Space (Harré, 1983), I analyzed the ways in which the discourse around the teaching practices, for both "active-learning" and "traditional" classrooms, changed over the course of a semester and the role lead TAs and others had in their publicized interpretations. Two different types of changes were recorded, elaboration and transformation, and each was tracked as they were publicized over the course of the semester. I created criteria to determine whether or not the discourse around a particular teaching practice was conventionalized within a community. Results from this study give insight into what teaching practices were challenging to understand, as well as the interpretations taken up and conventionalized by the GTAs. Approximately 20% of the practices showed evidence of some form of conventionalization; some of the conventionalized practices were transformations of the original version. The lead TAs may have influence over GTAs' instructional practice, but they did not have much influence over the interpretations publicized. These results yield insights useful to faculty involved in the professional development of GTAs.
Author: Bahijah Abas
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Author: Hao Wang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages : 160
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Book Description
Informed by Critical Theory and Poststructuralist Theory and the intersections of agency, power, ideology, discourse, capital, and language, this study investigates how three ITAs construct their professional identities as instructors at a U.S. university. To gain an in-depth understanding of ITAs' professional identities development, the researcher uses a qualitative approach with a multi-case study design to examine various data and variables including a) undergraduates' feedback to ITAs' instruction, b) ITAs' English language use in academic settings and its influence on their teaching, and c) the role of ITAs' supervisors on their professional practice. Through narrative analysis, the researcher analyzes data from interviews, classroom observations, and research journals. Findings suggest that both course evaluations and ITAs' interactions with supervisors and colleagues influence their professional identity formation. Additionally, the ITAs' English language use in academic settings reflects their desire of becoming native English speakers for an audience of mostly US undergraduates.
