Developing Conceptual and Teaching Expertise in Physics Graduate Students: An Integrated Approach

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Although there have been many projects for training TAs, little research has focused on the specific nature of the challenges. This project details the expectations, attitudes, and epistemologies of graduate teaching assistants towards educational reform, and develops a learning environment to help them overcome problems. The project is addressing two issues surrounding the education and professional development of physics graduate students. Graduate student teaching assistants (TAs) are often expected to play significant roles in implementing "collaborative active learning" sessions, where students work in small groups. However, many TAs have trouble teaching in this format, partly because of their views about how students learn. Also, some physics graduate students do not continue to develop conceptual expertise, reaching a deep level of qualitative understanding of core physical concepts that facilitates both research and teaching. This is because graduate coursework often stresses mathematical methods rather than conceptual expertise. The professional development of TAs in physics departments is typically handled separately from graduate education in physics. Research suggests, however, that it might be effective and efficient to foster conceptual expertise and teaching expertise in a unified way. In this pilot project the investigators are creating and teaching a professional development seminar designed to help graduate students develop sophisticated teaching practices and "learning theories" to apply both to their teaching and to their own learning. The project is conducting research on the ways in which the structure of TA seminars and associated teaching in a reformed introductory physics course changes TAs' teaching, conceptual expertise, and epistemologies - their views about the nature of knowledge and learning. Teachers' epistemologies strongly affect their success at implementing collaborative active-learning materials. One issue is the extent to which TAs think students can learn from listening to mini-lectures vs. working through problems for themselves. Another is the importance they attach to addressing everyday experiences and preconceptions as part of learning physics. Thus, the investigators are observing graduate students who are participating in this project using a variety of methods (including periodic interviews and videotaped observations of their teaching) to probe their epistemologies and their approaches to teaching and learning. By comparing TAs in the program to an absolute standard of effective practice and by analyzing in depth the trajectories of their epistemologies and teaching practices, the investigators are developing hypotheses that can be tested rigorously in a subsequent project. TAs in the sciences include almost all of the next generation of university science faculty; in physics they are involved in much of the actual delivery of introductory physics classes, typically responsible for all small-group environments. Since many of the most effective instructional innovations developed for introductory college-level physics are delivered in small-group environments, the ability of TAs to deliver reformed instruction is critical to the success or failure of a reform.