Agents of Change: Investigating How Partnerships between Faculty and Learning Assistants Enable Pathways for Sustainable Institutional and Classroom Transformation

This project aims to serve the national interest by exploring how partnerships between STEM faculty and undergraduate learning assistants (LAs) can enable sustainable institutional and classroom transformation that leads to more inclusive and engaging learning environments for students. The national LA model describes the well-established practice of embedding LAs in courses to assist in creating culturally responsive, student-centered, active learning environments.

The model offers support to LAs through training that consists of a course on teaching and learning as well as weekly meetings with the course instructor to review relevant course content and prepare for class activities. STEM instructors will participate in novel professional development that engages LAs as partners in the process of implementing inclusive and active learning practices, leveraging LAs’ knowledge as students.

These partnerships will also enable more accessible relational structures in the classroom. While prior research has demonstrated increased learning gains and other beneficial outcomes for LAs and students, it is important to fully characterize what happens on the ground that leads to such exciting learning gains, and to institutionalize key aspects of these programs.

In this project, the researchers plan to study how the new support structures for faculty offered by the project enable new kinds of relationships to form between LAs and faculty. They will then model how those relationships lead to shifts in LA and faculty beliefs about teaching and learning, and examine which programmatic elements are necessary for institutional transformation.

LA programs necessarily require involvement of many stakeholders, which makes them challenging to institutionalize. Therefore the project includes the infrastructure to collaborate with necessary administrators and learning centers in addition to faculty (tenure- and non-tenure track) and students to identify barriers and avenues to institutionalized change.

Once completed, the critical elements of this project will be assembled to assist other institutions who are interested in developing an LA model at their institution or who already have an LA model and would like to further support their LA-faculty partnerships.

The theory of change underpinning this project builds on existing models of LA-faculty collaboration and institutional change research to hypothesize how developing strong LA-faculty partnerships results in sustained improvements to STEM instruction. This project will study what partnership elements are necessary for effective and equitable changes in instruction to occur and what programmatic structure is required to enable such partnerships.

This will be carried out in a three-phase program of research, faculty professional development, and institutionalization with the following goals. First is to characterize the dynamics of LA-faculty partnerships and how they impact classrooms. Second is to iteratively design, implement, and research supports for LA-faculty partnerships including cross-campus trainings and academies.

Third, and finally, is to institutionalize key supports for sustaining the LA programs. Using a mixed methods approach, including iterative thematic coding of qualitative data and descriptive statistics of quantitative data, this project will analyze and triangulate: i) surveys and inventories for LAs, faculty, and students; ii) interviews with LAs and faculty; iii) observations of LA-faculty prep meetings; and iv) artifacts from the LA pedagogy course and faculty professional development.

This project will compare LA programs on three California State University campuses, capitalizing on each of their strengths, and complementing and extending existing knowledge on the potential benefits of LA models. This project will compare progress across the three institutions and identify critical factors necessary for the success, scalability, and sustainability of LA-faculty partnership programs, contributing significantly to research on institutional change.

The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through its Institutional and Community Transformation track, the program supports efforts to transform and improve STEM education across institutions of higher education and disciplinary communities.

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.