Project Background

In 2017-18, a group of faculty and students overhauled the Introductory Physics Lab for Life Sciences (IPLS) courses at the University of Utah. The course content now focuses on life science topics, including molecular transport, diffusion, molecular motors, hemodynamics, electrophoresis, fluorescence, spectroscopy, and axon transmission. The course structure is also different from most intro labs - students work in groups of four to design and carry out their own investigations over multiple weeks and engage in vigorous discussions with other groups where they present and defend their findings. Our team has published education research into the experiences of students in IPLS courses, focusing mostly on how students engage in "sensemaking" - an important component of scientific reasoning - as they carry out their investigations. Our prior research shows that teaching assistants (TAs) struggle to support student sensemaking in an equitable way in this environment. Your effort would be an integral part of a larger project with pending funding from the National Science Foundation, which aims to address a gap in knowledge about how TAs can support student sensemaking in such large-enrollment lab courses. The specific activities for your 10-week SPUR project are to perform qualitative analysis of audio-video data in order to design and test weekly interventions and training modules for TAs to foster student sensemaking. The training program will focus on four key pillars: building a teaching-team community, learning and practicing pedagogical skills, recognizing and supporting sensemaking, and attending to equity in the IPLS environment.

This project is co-mentored with Dr. Kelby Hahn

Student Role

Your SPUR project will be part of a broader effort to foster sensemaking in introductory physics labs using a design-based research (DBR) approach, which involves the iterative design of educational interventions coupled with research on their impact. Your role would be to design the semester-long educational intervention for TAs, which necessitates analyzing existing audio-video data to inform the design, and to consider future data collection in the design process. Since this project requires analyzing human data, you would first complete the Internal Review Board (IRB) training on best practices and ethics for working with human subjects. After completing the IRB training you would analyze existing audio-video data of students and TAs in the IPLS lab sections building off work completed by prior students that focused on TA-student interactions. The goal of the analysis is to extract key information that will inform the design of the TA training intervention to help TAs learn how to equitably support student sensemaking. The day-to-day work would be a mix of watching videos while taking detailed notes, reviewing relevant literature, and creating the activities for the TA training. As part of the DBR process, the impact of these activities must be studied; thus, you will need to consider future data collection and analysis in your design. This kind of work is a great fit for students within and beyond the physics discipline and is focused on skills relevant to teaching, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and beyond. Understanding of physics, while useful, is not required for success in this project.

Student Learning Outcomes and Benefits

If you join this project, you will gain experience with qualitative education research methods that you will use to analyze audio-visual recordings and extract key information relevant to TA support for student sensemaking. More specifically, you will learn about ethical issues involved with human-subjects research and grow your ability to notice specific features in audio-visual data, develop "codes" for recurring features and themes, and interpret the occurrence of those codes. You will also learn about various theories related to how people learn, how they interact during group work, and how the experiences of students in the same environment can vary depending on their background and identity. Since the project combines research and intervention design using DBR (see above), you will also gain experience with curriculum design and other aspects related to teaching - including designing activities so that you can gather evidence about their effectiveness - and education more broadly. This makes the project particularly well suited to students interested in a career in education research and/or teaching but would also be a good fit for anyone motivated by the goals of this project as described above.

 

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