The implementation of learning assistants in large introductory chemistry courses leads to increased student achievement and decreased failure rates. It is particularly beneficial for students from marginalized groups. However, not every interaction between a learning assistant and a group of students is effective. Thus, we aim at investigating what constitutes effective interactions. To do so, we seek to answer two research questions: (1) What and how do students learn in the moment of interactions with learning assistants? (2) How do learning assistants facilitate this learning process? Guided by a sociocultural perspective, we use video data of interactions between learning assistants and students in Zoom breakout rooms during a remote general chemistry 2 lecture and stimulated recall interviews with the learning assistants to address these research questions. In-the-moment learning is characterized using practical epistemology analysis, which is suitable to describe learning processes as they occur by defining learning as filling gaps with relations. Gaps are students’ needs to make something intelligible to be able to progress in an activity and can be expressed indirectly or directly by asking questions. Filling gaps with relations means making connections between what is in question and words and actions that the students already know. Learning assistants’ facilitation practices are characterized with the formative assessment enactment model that identifies facilitation practices as either eliciting, i.e. finding out about students’ thinking, or advancing, i.e. furthering students’ thinking toward the scientific story. Eliciting and advancing can be enacted in authoritative ways, i.e. driven by the learning assistant’s perspective, or in dialogic ways, i.e. driven by multiple student perspectives. Here we use a case study to present how authoritative and dialogic eliciting and advancing are effective in different ways during students’ learning processes. Implications for implementation and training of learning assistants are discussed.

Zooming into learning processes in general chemistry and their facilitation by learning assistants

ACS Fall 2021

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.