So who knew, Learning Assistants were in important.
It’s the third day of the American Association of Physics Teachers. I want to take a moment and report on the 2nd day. For me, the 2nd day was all about Learning Assistants. I gave my poster on my “Adelphi Lab For Kids: Amping up Physics Outreach for a Post-Pandemic World”. It was surprisingly well attended. By the end of the poster session I was able to sum up the success of our work with three ideas.
1. Physics Outreach, College students with an interest in education careers teaching high school students about physics.
2. Scale. We go to 13+ different high schools every year and see a lot of high school students.
3. We have applied a learning assistant model for our college student leaders who participate in the program, whereby the students take a class to learn about physics education. And this is generating interest in physics high school teaching careers.
Of course, I couldn’t even have uttered the third bullet at the beginning of the day. Who knows why I do what I do? But spending the day with amazing Learning Assistant program leaders taught me a lot.
I got introduced to the Learning Assistant Alliance (https://www.learningassistantalliance.org/)
From their website:
Impact on Student Performance
Alzen, Langdon, and Otero (2018) analyzed institutional data from over 20,000 students across five years, controlling for instructor effects by comparing the same instructors teaching courses with and without LAs. They found that students who participated in at least one LA-supported course were 60% less likely to fail subsequent calculus, chemistry, or physics courses.
Outcomes for LAs
LAs gain increased content knowledge and stronger STEM identities (Close, Conn, & Close, 2016; Nadelson & Fannigan, 2014).
LAs are nearly 10 times more likely to graduate within six years than matched peers (Otero, 2015).
About 12% of LAs pursue K-12 teaching careers. Those who become secondary teachers are more likely to use learner-centered teaching practices than their peers (Gray, Webb, & Otero, 2016).
Adelphi University had an amazing start of LA model. And we got rid of it. We need to get it back!!!
Should we do this for every class? No! Only introduction classes with high DFW rates: Intro Physics, Intro Chemistry, Calculus, Statistics, etc. And maybe biology doesn’t belong.
Should we just let students just teach other students? No. This has to be a journey and that journey is what makes it so successful. Faculty need mentor their learning assistants with love and the learning assistants need mentor their students with love. The love is important.
Oh boy do I have ideas. Let’s chat! All I know where now:
Universities with LAs have better graduation rates!
And graduation outcomes
I was in a room of national movers and shakers at this physics education conference and like 3 of the people in the room were past Adelphi recitation leaders. 3 is not a big number of course, but there are a lot of universities and Adelphi was well represented! Learning Assistants have impact!
It was nice to see so many Adelphi Physics Alums out in the world being amazing!
Hot take: I love chicken wings but it is not appropriate to have them at a conference when I am supposed to be professional and clean.
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