The Benefits of Participating in a Learning Assistant Program on the Metacognitive Awareness and Motivation of Learning Assistants
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it