Agents of Change: Investigating How Partnerships between Faculty and Learning Assistants Enable Pathways for Sustainable Institutional and Classroom Transformation

变革的推动者：调查教师和学习助理之间的合作如何为可持续的机构和课堂转型提供途径

• 批准号: 2234074
• 负责人: Kimberly Coble
• 金额: $ 65.34万
• 依托单位: San Francisco State University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-07-01 至 2028-06-30
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2234074&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Agents; Change; Investigating; How; Partnerships

This project aims to serve the national interest by exploring how partnerships between STEM faculty and undergraduate learning assistants (LAs) can enable sustainable institutional and classroom transformation that leads to more inclusive and engaging learning environments for students. The national LA model describes the well-established practice of embedding LAs in courses to assist in creating culturally responsive, student-centered, active learning environments. The model offers support to LAs through training that consists of a course on teaching and learning as well as weekly meetings with the course instructor to review relevant course content and prepare for class activities. STEM instructors will participate in novel professional development that engages LAs as partners in the process of implementing inclusive and active learning practices, leveraging LAs’ knowledge as students. These partnerships will also enable more accessible relational structures in the classroom. While prior research has demonstrated increased learning gains and other beneficial outcomes for LAs and students, it is important to fully characterize what happens on the ground that leads to such exciting learning gains, and to institutionalize key aspects of these programs. In this project, the researchers plan to study how the new support structures for faculty offered by the project enable new kinds of relationships to form between LAs and faculty. They will then model how those relationships lead to shifts in LA and faculty beliefs about teaching and learning, and examine which programmatic elements are necessary for institutional transformation. LA programs necessarily require involvement of many stakeholders, which makes them challenging to institutionalize. Therefore the project includes the infrastructure to collaborate with necessary administrators and learning centers in addition to faculty (tenure- and non-tenure track) and students to identify barriers and avenues to institutionalized change. Once completed, the critical elements of this project will be assembled to assist other institutions who are interested in developing an LA model at their institution or who already have an LA model and would like to further support their LA-faculty partnerships. The theory of change underpinning this project builds on existing models of LA-faculty collaboration and institutional change research to hypothesize how developing strong LA-faculty partnerships results in sustained improvements to STEM instruction. This project will study what partnership elements are necessary for effective and equitable changes in instruction to occur and what programmatic structure is required to enable such partnerships. This will be carried out in a three-phase program of research, faculty professional development, and institutionalization with the following goals. First is to characterize the dynamics of LA-faculty partnerships and how they impact classrooms. Second is to iteratively design, implement, and research supports for LA-faculty partnerships including cross-campus trainings and academies. Third, and finally, is to institutionalize key supports for sustaining the LA programs. Using a mixed methods approach, including iterative thematic coding of qualitative data and descriptive statistics of quantitative data, this project will analyze and triangulate: i) surveys and inventories for LAs, faculty, and students; ii) interviews with LAs and faculty; iii) observations of LA-faculty prep meetings; and iv) artifacts from the LA pedagogy course and faculty professional development. This project will compare LA programs on three California State University campuses, capitalizing on each of their strengths, and complementing and extending existing knowledge on the potential benefits of LA models. This project will compare progress across the three institutions and identify critical factors necessary for the success, scalability, and sustainability of LA-faculty partnership programs, contributing significantly to research on institutional change. The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through its Institutional and Community Transformation track, the program supports efforts to transform and improve STEM education across institutions of higher education and disciplinary communities.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

该项目旨在通过探索STEM教师和本科生学习助理（LA）之间的伙伴关系如何实现可持续的机构和课堂转型，从而为学生提供更具包容性和吸引力的学习环境，从而为国家利益服务。国家LA模式描述了在课程中嵌入LA的成熟做法，以帮助创建文化响应，以学生为中心，积极的学习环境。该模式通过培训向地方当局提供支助，培训内容包括教学课程以及每周与课程教员举行会议，以审查相关课程内容并为课堂活动做准备。STEM教师将参与新颖的专业发展，在实施包容性和积极的学习实践的过程中，利用LAs作为学生的知识，使LAs成为合作伙伴。这些伙伴关系还将使课堂上的关系结构更容易接近。虽然先前的研究已经证明了学习收益的增加和其他有益的结果为洛杉矶和学生，重要的是要充分描述发生在地面上，导致这种令人兴奋的学习收益，并制度化这些程序的关键方面。在这个项目中，研究人员计划研究该项目为教师提供的新的支持结构如何使LAs和教师之间形成新的关系。然后，他们将模拟这些关系如何导致洛杉矶和教师对教学和学习的信念的转变，并研究哪些方案要素是必要的机构转型。LA计划必然需要许多利益相关者的参与，这使得它们难以制度化。因此，该项目包括与必要的管理人员和学习中心合作的基础设施，以及教师（终身制和非终身制轨道）和学生，以确定制度化变革的障碍和途径。一旦完成，该项目的关键要素将被组装，以帮助其他机构谁有兴趣在他们的机构开发一个LA模型或谁已经有一个LA模型，并希望进一步支持他们的LA-教师伙伴关系。 支撑这个项目的变革理论建立在现有的LA-教师合作和机构变革研究模型的基础上，以假设发展强大的LA-教师伙伴关系如何导致STEM教学的持续改进。本项目将研究哪些伙伴关系要素是有效和公平地改变教学所必需的，以及需要何种方案结构来促成这种伙伴关系。这将在研究，教师专业发展和制度化的三阶段计划中进行，目标如下。首先是表征LA教师伙伴关系的动态以及它们如何影响课堂。其次是迭代设计，实施和研究支持洛杉矶教师的伙伴关系，包括跨校园的培训和学院。第三，也是最后一点，是将维持洛杉矶项目的关键支持制度化。使用混合方法的方法，包括定性数据的迭代主题编码和定量数据的描述性统计，该项目将分析和三角测量：i）LAs，教师和学生的调查和库存; ii）与LAs和教师的访谈; iii）LA教师准备会议的观察; iv）来自LA教学法课程和教师专业发展的工件。该项目将比较三个加州州立大学校园的洛杉矶计划，利用他们的优势，并补充和扩展现有的知识洛杉矶模式的潜在好处。该项目将比较三个机构的进展情况，并确定洛杉矶教师合作计划的成功，可扩展性和可持续性所需的关键因素，为机构变革研究做出重大贡献。NSF IUSE：EDU计划支持研究和开发项目，以提高所有学生STEM教育的有效性。通过其机构和社区转型的轨道，该计划支持的努力，以改变和改善高等教育机构和学科社区的STEM教育。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响力审查标准进行评估的支持。