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- All Subjects: Graduate teaching assistants
- Creators: Mustard, Julie
- Creators: Thompson, Patrick W
Description
The gender gap of women in science is an important and unresolved issue in higher education and occupational opportunities. The present study was motivated by the fact that there are typically fewer females than males advancing in science, and therefore fewer female science instructor role models. This observation inspired the questions: Are female college students influenced in a positive way by female science teaching assistants (TAs), and if so how can their influence be measured? The study tested the hypothesis that female TAs act as role models for female students and thereby encourage interest and increase overall performance. To test this "role model" hypothesis, the reasoning ability and self-efficacy of a sample of 724 introductory college biology students were assessed at the beginning and end of the Spring 2010 semester. Achievement was measured by exams and course work. Performance of four randomly formed groups was compared: 1) female students with female TAs, 2) male students with female TAs, 3) female students with male TAs, and 4) male students with male TAs. Based on the role model hypothesis, female students with female TAs were predicted to perform better than female students with male TAs. However, group comparisons revealed similar performances across all four groups in achievement, reasoning ability and self-efficacy. The slight differences found between the four groups in student exam and coursework scores were not statistically significant. Therefore, the results did not support the role model hypothesis. Given that both lecture professors in the present study were males, and given that professors typically have more teaching experience, finer skills and knowledge of subject matter than do TAs, a future study that includes both female science professors and female TAs, may be more likely to find support for the hypothesis.
ContributorsEbert, Darilyn (Author) / Lawson, Anton (Thesis advisor) / Maienschein, Jane (Committee member) / Mustard, Julie (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2010
Description
The advancement of technology has substantively changed the practices of numerous professions, including teaching. When an instructor first adopts a new technology, established classroom practices are perturbed. These perturbations can have positive and negative, large or small, and long- or short-term effects on instructors’ abilities to teach mathematical concepts with the new technology. Therefore, in order to better understand teaching with technology, we need to take a closer look at the adoption of new technology in a mathematics classroom. Using interviews and classroom observations, I explored perturbations in mathematical classroom practices as an instructor implemented virtual manipulatives as novel didactic objects in rational function instruction. In particular, the instructor used didactic objects that were designed to lay the foundation for developing a conceptual understanding of rational functions through the coordination of relative size of the value of the numerator in terms of the value of the denominator. The results are organized according to a taxonomy that captures leader actions, communication, expectations of technology, roles, timing, student engagement, and mathematical conceptions.
ContributorsPampel, Krysten (Author) / Currin van de Sande, Carla (Thesis advisor) / Thompson, Patrick W (Committee member) / Carlson, Marilyn (Committee member) / Milner, Fabio (Committee member) / Strom, April (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017