Recently, the Florida Consortium hosted a Learning Assistant Workshop at Florida International University. What is a Learning Assistant (LA)? Learning Assistants are not Teaching Assistants and yet they are more than your garden variety tutor. These undergraduate students are typically trained to host scheduled activities aligned to specific courses for groups of students. This approach is a win for an institution in that LAs hone valuable transferable career readiness skills, students can easily access additional support they need, and faculty can balance their research and teaching responsibilities. To date, Florida International University has successfully leveraged this technique to dramatically improve persistence in STEM courses.
According to the University of Colorado Boulder, “research has shown dramatic increases in student achievement in LA-supported courses (Pollock, 2009; Otero, 2015) and decreased failure rates in STEM gateway courses, particularly among students from groups that are traditionally underrepresented in college and in STEM (Alzen, Langdon, Otero, in press; Van Dusen & Nissen, in press). Research has also demonstrated that the LA program develops students’ science identities and improves learning outcomes for faculty as they learn to use LAs (Close, Conn, Close, 2016; Close, in press).”
The Florida Consortium Learning Assistant workshop is a part of the Florida Metropolitan STEM Continuum: From College to Career program which is funded by the Helmsley Charitable Trust. Over the last year, the Florida Consortium implemented three Network Improvement Communities (NICs) that focused their work on teaching and learning strategies, transfer student success, and career readiness. NICs looked at common challenges and areas where collaboration or knowledge sharing could lead to a wide range of interventions. For example, large gateway courses are common across FIU, UCF, and USF. In many cases, students that need additional engagement are hard pressed to identify appropriate resources on their own or as they move along in the gateway course. At at large institutions where capacity is already a challenge and high DFW rates hurt. So armed with this common concern, and after several rounds of investigative research; knowledge sharing and or training activities like the Learning Assistant Workshop were developed. The workshop was open to faculty from member intuitions at Florida International, University of Central Florida, University of South Florida as well as colleges and universities throughout the Sunshine State.
In closing, the Florida Consortium Learning Assistant workshop is another way that the Florida Consortium is actively working to share best practices that support wide scale student success and career readiness for students in Florida.
Event Website: http://laprogram.fiu.edu/florida-la-workshop/
Additional Reading
- FIU honored by White House for Bright Spots in Hispanic Education
- Moving toward change: Institutionalizing reform through implementation of the Learning Assistant model and Open Source Tutorials
- Investigating student communities with network analysis of interactions in a physics learning center
- Expanded Markers of Success in Introductory University Physics
- Integrating Efforts to Support Instructional Innovation Academic Futures Learning Assistant White Paper
- Learning Assistant Supported Student Outcomes (LASSO) study initial findings