Joanne,
I don't know that you were looking for hypotheses (nor do I know
anything about how your workshops are structured except from your
brief description), but here are a few thoughts:
* It's helpful for students to see what other students do/don't
understand; in particular, it helps them persist w/ difficult
material if they know that others also find it difficult (because
students often assume that everyone else understands the concept in
question and if they don't undertand it, they're stupid).
*Trying to put their thinking into words can give students a better
sense of what they do and don't understand.
* It's helpful for students to share their thinking w/ each other;
they get to hear how others approach a given problem, they can share
suggestions from their various TAs, ...
* Spending time in workshops with other students helps students
connect their social and academic lives.
Note: Uri Treisman identified some of these factors in the research
that lead him to design the Emerging Scholars model of calculus
workshops (although from your brief description, your workshops have
a different structure than Emerging Scholars workshops).
And given your research interests, you might want to join the RUME
list (RUME = Research on Undergraduate Math Ed; it's a Special
Interest Group of the MAA); see
http://betterfilecabinet.com/mailman/listinfo/rume_betterfilecabinet.com
for more info.
Dara
Hi:
I am Joanne Nakonechny at the University of British Columbia in
Vancouver, Canada. I work in the Science Centre for Learning and
Teaching (Skylight) which is a research focused unit. Right now I'm
involved in a research study that is trying to find out why peer
facilitated workshops where no solutions are given are helping
students pass. (Math180 is for students who do not have high school
calculus). The math department does have a teaching course for Math
TAs and if you go to the math department website:
http://www.math.ubc.ca you can find out more about it.
Good luck!
Joanne
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