Active learning (AL) teaching techniques – such as clicker questions, group work, think-pair-share, and other activities – benefit all students and can close the achievement gap for under-represented minority, first-generation, and female students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines. Consequently, many ecology courses have been integrating these techniques into their labs and lectures. Several initiatives have focused on training faculty, however there has been little emphasis on training teaching assistants (TAs) to use AL to better facilitate inquiry in their labs. We investigated AL training strategies with TAs by offering an AL workshop and splitting participants into an Activity (A) group and an Evidence (E) group. The A group worked in teams to learn an AL technique in depth with a workshop facilitator, then these teams modeled the activity with their peers acting as students; only a small portion of time was devoted to presenting or discussing the evidence of AL effectiveness. In the E group, facilitators modeled the activities with all TAs acting as students and spent significant time presenting evidence of AL’s effectiveness. Pre- and post-workshop and post-semester survey data were analyzed to assess TA perceptions of AL and the usefulness of the demonstrated techniques in their labs.
Results/Conclusions
E group participants reported greater knowledge of AL after the workshop than A group participants. However, A group participants found all of the active learning techniques more useful than E group participants. Both groups reported that the most useful active learning topics were Easy Assessment Techniques and Sequence Strips, which can be easily integrated into lab settings. There was little agreement on the least valuable techniques but TAs from both groups reported techniques requiring more time, materials, and planning as among the least useful aspects of the workshop. This is somewhat surprising given that some of these techniques – Case studies and Games and Simulations – are already commonly used in several of the lab courses taught by participating TAs. These results suggest that actually modeling AL techniques made them more useful to TAs than simply experiencing the same techniques as students—even with the accompanying evidence. Furthermore, assembling an easily implemented toolkit of strategies transferable to any course will facilitate TA adoption of AL. These lessons will be especially important for ecology TAs who are called upon to facilitate different types of inquiry—in the lab, field, and classroom—as they assist with the development of the next generation of ecologists.