Hannah Huvard’s research while affiliated with New Mexico State University and other places

div> The American Chemical Society holds supporting diverse student populations engaging in chemistry as a core value. We analyzed chemical concept inventory scores from 4,612 students across 12 institutions to determine what inequities in content knowledge existed before and after introductory college chemistry courses. We interpreted our findings from a Quantitative Critical (QuantCrit) perspective that framed inequities as educational debts that society owed students due to racism, sexism, or both. Results showed that society owed women and Black men large educational debts before and after instruction. Society’s educational debts before instruction were large enough that women and Black men’s average scores were lower than White men’s average pretest scores even after instruction. Society would have to provide opportunities equivalent to taking the course up to two and a half times to repay the largest educational debts. These findings show the scale of the inequities in the science education systems and highlight the need for reallocating resources and opportunities throughout the K-16 education system to mitigate, prevent, and repay society’s educational debts from sexism and racism. </div

Background A growing part of the efforts to promote student engagement and success in undergraduate STEM are the family of Student Support and Outreach Programs (SSOPs), which task undergraduate students with providing support and mentoring to their peers and near-peers. Research has shown that these programs can provide a variety of benefits for the programs’ recipients, including increased academic achievement, satisfaction, retention, and entry into STEM careers. This paper extends this line of inquiry to investigate how participation in these programs impacts the undergraduate STEM students that provide the mentoring (defined here as undergraduate mentor-teachers or UMTs). We use activity theory to explore the nature of metacognition and identity development in UMTs engaged in two programs at a public urban-serving university in the western USA: a STEM Learning Assistant program and a program to organize middle and high school STEM clubs. Constructs of metacognition and identity development are seen as critical outcomes of experiential STEM inreach and outreach programs. Results Written reflections were collected throughout implementation of two experiential STEM inreach and outreach programs. A thematic analysis of the reflections revealed UMTs using metacognitive strategies including content reflection and reinforcement and goal setting for themselves and the students they were supporting. Participants also showed metacognitive awareness of the barriers and challenges related to their role in the program. In addition to these metacognitive processes, the UMTs developed their science identities by attaching different meanings to their role as a mentor in their respective programs and setting performance expectations for their roles. Performance expectations were contingent on pedagogical skills and the amount and type of content knowledge needed to effectively address student needs. The ability to meet students’ needs served to validate and verify UMTs’ role in the program, and ultimately their own science identities. Conclusion Findings from this study suggest that metacognitive and identity developments are outcomes shaped not only by undergraduate students’ experiences, but also by their perceptions of what it means to learn and teach STEM. Experiential STEM inreach and outreach programs with structured opportunities for guided and open reflections can contribute to building participants’ metacognition and enhancing their science identities.

Background The success of the learning assistant (LA) model has largely been attributed to LA facilitation of active learning tasks. A deeper understanding of how LAs facilitate these tasks would inform LA training and support successful adoption of the LA model. Our investigation of LA actions during their interaction with students in the classroom contributes to that understanding. We present and discuss the development of the action taxonomy for learning assistants (ATLAs), as well as illustrate its applicability by presenting some analyses that were conducted on sample data. Results The LAs carried out several different actions that we categorized broadly as LA-Directed Facilitation, LA-Guided Facilitation, Advice, Feedback, Course-Related Talk, and Non-Course-Related Talk. LA-Directed Facilitation and LA-Guided Facilitation were the most common types of actions observed. We found that LA actions varied by course. Conclusions ATLAs is a tool that can be used to examine LA actions. In our sample data set, LAs undertook many different actions during interactions with students which indicates that LAs play several different roles in the classroom. These findings have practical implications not only for faculty seeking to implement a peer instruction model such as the LA model, but also for instructors wanting to utilize LAs in their courses more effectively. Understanding what the LAs are doing during interactions with students can provide us insight into the different roles that LAs undertake. Knowledge of these roles will guide effective training, feedback, and direction of LAs, particularly during the pedagogy course.