The Benefits of Participating in a Learning Assistant Program on the Metacognitive Awareness and Motivation of Learning Assistants

Learning assistant (LA) programs train undergraduate students to foster peer discussion and facilitate active-learning activities in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) classes. Students who take courses that are supported by LAs demonstrate better conceptual under...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:CBE - Life Sciences Education 2023-09, Vol.22 (3), p.ar30-ar30
Main Authors: Breland, Haley, Clark, Courtney M, Shaked, Shanna, Paquette-Smith, Melissa
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Change
Discussion
General s and
Metacognition
Peer Relationship
Pretests Posttests
Self Efficacy
STEM Education
Student Motivation
Student Participation
Teaching Assistants
Undergraduate Students
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Summary:Learning assistant (LA) programs train undergraduate students to foster peer discussion and facilitate active-learning activities in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) classes. Students who take courses that are supported by LAs demonstrate better conceptual understanding, lower failure rates, and higher satisfaction with the course. There is less work, however, on the impact that participating in LA programs has on the LAs themselves. The current study implements a pretest-posttest design to assess changes in LAs' metacognition and motivation to succeed in STEM across their first and second quarters as an LA. Our findings suggest that participating in this program may help LAs become more reflective learners, as was demonstrated by an increase in their scores on the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (MAI) after the first quarter. LAs also showed increases on the Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Efficacy subscales of the Science Motivation Questionnaire. Students who participated in the program for an additional quarter continued to show increases in their MAI scores and maintained the gains that were observed in their motivation. Taken together, this work suggests that, in addition to benefiting the learner, LA programs may have positive impacts on the LAs themselves.
ISSN:1931-7913
1931-7913
DOI:10.1187/cbe.22-08-0156