Impact of “teaching college science” courses on graduate students Jared & Rachel

Assessment of Graduate Teaching Assistants Enrolled in a Teaching Techniques Course On a sheet of paper - take 10 minutes to answer these questions and reflect on your learning in STEM 810 thus far. Students will complete this as they come in to class. Some students will be late so we will give until 8:10 to complete the worksheet individually. Students will then be instructed to discuss their thoughts with a neighbor, then as a table. Maybe we can have students share areas where they feel like they have really improved their knowledge and areas that they are still curious about. Maybe one of each so that we don’t have a negative spin to whole day?

Who actually took these courses? Discuss in groups: What population were these courses designed for? Who actually took them? What are the similarities and differences between their populations and the population that STEM 810 serves?

What topics are discussed in these courses? We will present these tables. Students will be instructed to first individually read through the tables and compare them to each other, then to our syllabus. They will then discuss their thoughts as a table and find overlaps/missing pieces. We will ask for group discussion - then pose a new question - where does our STEM 810 class fit in? What topics are we covering that are the same/different/wish we were covering.

Assessment via concept inventory Where do the data in this table come from? Does a concept inventory tell the whole story? Mo data, mo problems Students will look at the table in groups first, revisit the paper and try to determine what the takeaway is from this data. Then we will share as a class and decide the benefits of a similar concept inventory across courses/campuses.

How do we compare “Teacher Prep” courses across universities? Should we? Discuss in groups: How could we compare courses? (e.g. criteria, course descriptions) Benefits of comparison? Difficulties of comparison? School “A” School “B”

Result of riding your bike in Fargo after Nov 15 Measuring success “One major limitation of these results is that the effect of this course is con- founded with the GTA’s first-semester teaching. Therefore, changes in attitudes or ideas about teaching could also be related to that experience. Additionally, this research did not measure if this course changes GTA teaching behavior or, more important, if this course influences undergraduate student learning in the classroom.” Caralyn Zehnder p. 81 How should we measure success of these programs? Should we go beyond the thoughts/opinions of the TAs to the successes of the students? Result of riding your bike in Fargo after Nov 15