Chemistry graduate teaching assistants’ teacher noticing

Abstract

Chemistry graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) have substantial facetime with undergraduate students at large research institutions where they lead discussion and lab sessions. Emerging research describes GTAs’ content and teaching knowledge for introductory chemistry classes, but we need to know more about how GTAs manage their classes in the moment and how they assess student learning during class time. We conducted classroom observations and post-observation interviews with six chemistry GTAs with various years of teaching experience and who were teaching a variety of classes (e.g., general chemistry discussion, biochemistry discussion, organic chemistry lab, computational chemistry lab, and more). These GTAs were each observed and interviewed multiple times over the course of a semester. Through qualitative analysis guided by the teacher noticing framework, we describe what chemistry GTAs notice, or pay attention to, regarding student learning in their teaching sessions and how they interpret what they notice. We found that chemistry GTAs often paid attention to the types of questions that students asked but relied on their students to take initiative to ask questions in order to assess their learning. Also, GTAs often focused on superficial features of their class sessions to assess learning, like whether students finished their tasks and left their session early. However, some GTAs noticed more sophisticated evidence of student understanding, such as when students connected content covered across multiple class sessions. The results from this study contribute to our understanding of how chemistry GTAs lead their sessions and evaluate student learning during their sessions. Results serve to inform potential training designs that can support chemistry GTAs’ teacher learning through learning to notice—and to create opportunities to notice—significant features of their classrooms.

10 Guiding principles for learning in the laboratory

“…Very recent work has explored in depth how graduate teaching assistants manage their classroom environments, and identified the kinds of observations of student behaviours that are made and what is inferred from them. This work shares a highly valuable guidance for developing graduate teaching assistants' capacity to lead in their laboratory teaching work (Geragosian et al, 2023).…”

“…Define and share module and laboratory specific outcomes so that appropriate teaching and learning methods and assessment can be implemented Source potential laboratory learning outcomes and define those appropriate for stage of study (Agustian et al, 2022a) Define intended curriculum goals appropriate for stage and/or overall intended outcomes (Seery et al, 2019b;Campbell et al, 2022) Develop a departmental culture and module community for those involved in teaching laboratory work, with formalised continuing professional development, mentoring, and sharing to build coherence and share best practices Plan departmental and laboratory course communities based on the discussion and practice of laboratory activities, including mentoring and ongoing continuing professional development Ensure the transient community of teaching assistants have appropriate upskilling to engage fully in their teaching activities (Flaherty et al, 2017;Richards-Babb et al, 2014;Geragosian et al, 2023) This journal is © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2024 organic chemistry laboratory work, Gorman et al (2021) used this framework to guide the preparation of students for the techniques that they would need to complete by prompting students to read the procedure in advance, watch associated technique videos, and answer questions based on these techniques. Rodriguez and Towns (2018) tasked students in advance of their general chemistry laboratory work to write pre-laboratory questions that focussed on connecting between the conceptual content, the purpose of the experiment, and the related method, aligning this approach with the scientific practices of planning and carrying out investigations.…”