Recommendations for biology education describe how effective instruction promotes authentic engagement in biological practices (e.g. analyzing data) and discourses (e.g. discussing possible explanations). Just as biologists engage in these activities to generate biological knowledge, students need similar experiences to develop durable understanding of biological phenomena, and laboratory courses seem like an opportune context for such engagement. However, laboratory courses are largely taught by graduate or undergraduate teaching assistants (TAs), who are responsible for facilitating such experiences with minimal teacher preparation. Moreover, TAs generally juggle multiple commitments (e.g. coursework, research, teaching) and teaching responsibilities are not often considered opportunities to develop as a research scientist. However, some evidence suggests that orchestrating classroom opportunities for authentic disciplinary engagement improves scientific expertise. This study describes what 12 undergraduate biology TAs learned, as teachers and as biologists, after teaching a general biology laboratory course designed around authentic investigations. TAs completed pre- and post-measures of content knowledge, conceptual frameworks, and teacher beliefs, which I analyzed using paired samples t-tests. To analyze teaching practice, I recorded and transcribed each TA teaching the same 5 lessons over the semester. The coding scheme was grounded in the Ambitious Science Teaching framework and used the conventions of conversation analysis.
Results/Conclusions
The frequency of ambitious teaching practices increased throughout the semester. The video analysis indicated that many TAs used ambitious talk moves more frequently, eliciting student thinking and pressing students for evidence and reasoning. TAs also shifted significantly towards more student-centered beliefs about learning and teaching. To describe conceptual frameworks for biology, each TA completed a card-sorting task by grouping 16 problems based on their ideas of organizing principles in biology. TAs made significantly more expert parings and fewer novice pairings at the end of the semester, indicating a shift from a more novice to a more expert conceptual framework. Additionally, TA scores on the biology content knowledge assessment increased significantly. Based on the conversation analysis, some TAs also engaged students in dialogue with similar features to lab meeting and reading group discussions within the scientific community. These dialogic moments provide further support that TAs developed as both teachers and scientists over one semester, as classroom instruction included more moments of authentic disciplinary engagement. These findings are important to illustrate that TAs can develop ambitious teaching practices over one semester. Additionally, this study adds further support to the link between developing ambitious teaching practices and developing as a research scientist.