Date of Award

Spring 2025

Project Type

Dissertation

Program or Major

Mathematics

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

First Advisor

Orly Buchbinder

Second Advisor

Maria Basterra

Third Advisor

Karen J Graham

Abstract

Learning Assistants (LAs) are undergraduate near-peer tutors who aid in the instruction of collegiate courses in which they have previously been successful as students. It has been consistently shown that students in LA-supported STEM courses have more positive course outcomes than their peers without LA support. The benefits include improved retention, better scores on content assessments requiring higher-order reasoning, and a greater sense of belonging in STEM. Little is known about why students in LA-supported courses evidence this range of positive course outcomes, but it is conjectured that LAs facilitate these outcomes through their frequent and engaging interactions with students. This dissertation further explores the nature of LA-student interactions through three distinct studies of LA classroom practice in a Calculus I course. The first study examines LA-student discourse around specific content (implicit differentiation) in order to gain a nuanced understanding of classroom communication surrounding course material. The second study details students’ perspectives on these interactions, presenting quantitative and natural language processing (NLP) based analyses of students’ responses to survey items about their perspectives on LA classroom practices. The third study focuses on LAs as teaching para-professionals and their pedagogical growth. This study examines LAs’ discourse about their experiences in classrooms, uncovering changes in LAs’ perceptions and interpretations of their teaching as they gain experience as LAs through an innovative large language model (LLM) approach to qualitative analysis. When considered together, these three studies generate a larger picture of life in an LA-supported Calculus I classroom, depicting how content and communities come together to support student learning in this type of environment.

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