Addressing the Challenge of Authentic Inquiry at Scale: Probing and Supporting Teaching Assistants’ Implementation of a Model-Based-Inquiry Curriculum

该项目旨在通过帮助学生更好地理解科学研究的本质来服务于国家利益。为学生提供参与科学研究的机会可以增加他们留在STEM职业道路上的机会，特别是对于那些尚未在STEM中获得公平代表的群体的学生。然而，许多学生并没有找到自己的研究机会，这表明课程改革需要给所有学生带来研究经验。该项目建立在通过建模进行真实探究（AIM-Bio）的基础上，这是一个实验室课程，为学生提供提出科学问题的机会，并开发他们自己的实验来测试他们的问题。AIM-Bio已经记录了学生的好处，包括增加他们对自己工作的所有权，他们作为科学家的身份，以及他们关于科学如何运作的技能和知识。该项目团队希望将AIM-Bio课程每年带给亚利桑那大学（一所西班牙裔服务机构）的1700多名学生。为了应对这一挑战，我们需要培养作为AIM-Bio实验室助教（助教）的本科生和研究生，他们将成为AIM-Bio的主要导师。该项目计划制定一个培训计划，使助教能够指导学生进行科学探究，即提出和回答基于科学的问题的开放式过程。该项目还打算研究助教的教学意图与他们在实验室与学生的实际互动之间的一致性。通过关注助教的教学决策和行动背后的基本原理，本项目将提供新的见解，以指导助教成为教学专业人员的努力。助教通过与实验区学生的个人互动，在大规模实施真实探究课程中扮演着重要角色。先前的研究表明，助教最初可能会与探究性课程的开放性作斗争，他们往往更喜欢使用与更传统的教学观点相一致的直接教学形式。为了制定培训策略，以支持助教实施真实探究性教学的能力，了解助教对教学挑战的看法至关重要。为此，本项目旨在：1)开发一套专业发展课程，以支持助教进行基于课程的真实探究教学；2)建立一个模型，解释助教在教授基于课程的真实探究课程时的意图与行动之间的关系。研究方法将包括刺激回忆访谈，这将要求助教反思他们自己的教学片段。收集到的信息将被分析，以确定助教实施课程活动的意图和他们在活动中与学生互动所采取的行动之间的关系。除了访谈之外，将使用独特的分析框架对实验室助教的录音进行调查，该框架捕捉了指导学生进行科学建模实践的过程。访谈和课堂指导的结合分析将使项目团队获得助教对AIM-Bio课程实施情况的整体看法。最后，为了阐明助教意图和行动的潜在后果，项目组将比较采用不同教学方法的助教对学生的影响。本项目由NSF IUSE: EHR项目资助，该项目支持研究和开发项目，以提高所有学生STEM教育的有效性。通过参与学生学习轨道，该计划支持有前途的实践和工具的创建，探索和实施。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project aims to serve the national interest by helping students better understand the nature of scientific research. Providing opportunities for students to participate in scientific research increases their chances of remaining on a STEM career path, especially for students from groups that are not yet equitably represented in STEM. However, many students do not find research opportunities on their own, suggesting that curricular reform is needed to bring research experiences to all students. This project builds on Authentic Inquiry through Modeling (AIM-Bio), a laboratory curriculum that provides students with opportunities to ask scientific questions and to develop their own experiments to test their questions. AIM-Bio has documented benefits for students, including increases in their ownership of their work, their identity as scientists, and their skills and knowledge about how science works. The project team seeks to bring the AIM-Bio curriculum to more than 1,700 students per year at the University of Arizona, a Hispanic Serving Institution. Meeting this challenge will require preparing the undergraduate and graduate students who serve as teaching assistants (TAs) for AIM-Bio laboratories, and who will thus be the principal instructors for AIM-Bio. The project plans to develop a training program that will prepare the TAs to mentor students in scientific inquiry, the open-ended process of asking and answering science-based questions. The project also intends study the alignment between TAs’ intentions about teaching and their actual interactions with students in the laboratory. By including a focus on the rationale behind TAs’ teaching decisions and actions, this project will provide novel insights to guide efforts to train TAs as teaching professionals. Through their personal interactions with students in laboratory sections, TAs hold an essential role in large-scale implementation of authentic-inquiry curricula. Prior research suggests that TAs may initially struggle with the open nature of an inquiry curriculum, often preferring to use forms of direct instruction consistent with more traditional views of teaching. To develop training strategies that will support the TAs’ ability to enact authentic-inquiry instruction, it is critical to understand TAs’ perspectives about teaching challenges. To this end, the project aims to: 1) Develop a professional development curriculum to support TAs in course-based authentic inquiry instruction, and 2) Build a model to explain the relationship between TA intentions and actions when teaching a course-based authentic inquiry curriculum. Research methods will include stimulated recall interviews, which will ask TAs to reflect on episodes of their own teaching. The collected information will be analyzed to identify the relationships between TAs intentions for implementing curricular activities and the actions they take to interact with students during those activities. In addition to the interviews, recordings of TAs in the laboratory will be investigated using a unique analytical framework that captures the process of mentoring students in the scientific practice of modeling. Combined analysis of interviews and classroom mentoring will allow the project team to gain a holistic view of TAs' implementation of the AIM-Bio curriculum. Finally, to shed light on the potential consequences of TAs intentions and actions, the project team will compare student outcomes between TAs with different teaching approaches. This project is funded by the NSF IUSE: EHR Program, which supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.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.