Teaching Assistant Pedagogical Development: Evolution, Biological Change over Time, and Concept Based Instruction
Open Access
- Author:
- King, Seth Lawrence
- Graduate Program:
- Applied Linguistics
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- September 26, 2018
- Committee Members:
- James Lantolf, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
James Lantolf, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Karen E Johnson, Committee Member
Meredith Christine Doran, Committee Member
Richard Alan Duschl, Outside Member - Keywords:
- Sociocultural Theory
Vygotsky
Science education
Teacher education
Concept Based Instruction
Applied Linguistics
Teaching Assistants - Abstract:
- Laboratories as teaching spaces are an integral part of the tertiary STEM education system in conjunction with lectures and recitations. However, conceptual development in laboratories has been largely understudied in great part because of the relative difficulty in assessing conceptual knowledge in the laboratory environment. To compound pedagogy in this situation there is the added confluence that laboratories are for the most part taught by teaching assistants, who have little to no training in pedagogy nor pedagogical content knowledge. One of the goals of this dissertation is to describe and explain how a Vygotsky oriented Concept based instruction based pedagogy training affects instructor development in the university-level teaching laboratory environment as well as to show that student’s of instructors who participated in the CBI training sessions have improved learning outcomes in the work they produce throughout the course. Moreover, the study investigated the development of scientific concepts in this setting in conjunction with the CBI pedagogy model, which was designed to promote and mediate the development of scientific concepts and scientific thinking in undergraduate students. This study was the culmination of many different factors working simultaneously. There was the observation portion, which included video and audio recordings of two sections of the laboratories of an introductory biology course throughout the duration of a semester. There was the weekly CBI training sessions, where in the researcher met with the teaching assistant instructors of those two lab sessions and worked with them to create teaching materials, including several SCOBAs, as well as develop themselves as both biology and writing instructors and explore the purposeful activities they used in the lab with students to facilitate more conceptually oriented communication. The results of this study focus on the TAs’ development as well as the analysis of student produced written compositions, which show student conceptual development over the course of a semester. In particular, the results of this study discusses the student produced lab reports, which covered the final major topic of the course, Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria, and compared the work of the students who were in sections of the CBI-trained TAs with the work of students in sections of TAs with no CBI training. The work of student of four TAs’ sections is assessed qualitatively via a grading rubric and four independent biology experts. Additionally, the student work is also assessed quantitatively via corpus analysis as well as syntactic complexity analysis. The results of the analysis show that student learning outcomes from the CBI groups were superior to those of the traditional instruction groups.