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American Journal of Physics -- November 2012 -- Volume 80, Issue 11, pp. 1020

Preparing tutorial and recitation instructors: A pedagogical approach to focusing attention on content and student reasoning

Benjamin T. Spike and Noah D. Finkelstein

Department of Physics, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, Colorado 80309

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Instructors in transformed educational environments face an increased demand to anticipate, engage with, and build upon student ideas in the classroom. Consequently, there is a need to augment traditional forms of preparation to accommodate the expanding role of instructors in these environments. We document a model of weekly preparation designed to engage graduate teaching assistants (TAs) and undergraduate learning assistants (LAs) in developing broader teaching skills through the weekly discussion of student difficulties. In this paper, we describe this model and present evidence of success at focusing instructor attention on student difficulties, accomplished within existing institutional structures and without adding significantly to instructor preparation time.

© 2012 American Association of Physics Teachers

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to thank the physics faculty facilitators who provided their full cooperation with this study, as well as the TAs and LAs who participated. They also gratefully acknowledge the PER group at CU for their insightful commentary. This work is supported by NSF Grant #0833364.

Article Outline

  1. INTRODUCTION
  2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
  3. STUDY
    1. Overview of tutorials and weekly preparation
    2. Methods
  4. RESULTS
    1. Focusing instructor attention
    2. Implementation and institutional framing
  5. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

KEYWORDS and PACS

Keywords

further education, physics education, teaching

PACS

  • 01.40.Fk

    Research in physics education

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History
Received Jan 2012
Accepted Jul 2012

PUBLICATION DATA

ISSN

0002-9505 (print)  
1943-2909 (online)

Publisher

$abstract.society.value is a Member of CrossRef American Association of Physics Teachers

ARTICLE DATA

Digital Object Identifier
http://dx.doi.org/10.1119/1.4737852

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