UA Little Rock Researchers Publish Paper Showcasing Benefit of Creating Online Learning Training for Student Peer Mentors

Two UA Little Rock researchers have published a paper describing the benefits of creating training scenarios that show peer mentors how to prepare to teach in an online environment.

David Caldwell, a 2023 graduate of UA Little Rock with a bachelor's degree in biology and Dr. Michael Moore, director of undergraduate research and mentoring at UA Little Rock, published their findings in the Journal of College Science Teaching.

The article, "Assessing Interactions between Students and Learning Assistants in in-Person vs. Online Environments," is the second in a series that discuss training in UA Little Rock's Learning Assistants (LA) Program. Learning assistants are peer mentors who are trained to help students understand class material using evidence-based practices like facilitated group work.

Peer mentors assist fellow students in classes that the peer mentor has already successfully completed. Peer mentors often undergo training to increase the positive impact of their mentorship. At UA Little Rock, LAs take a pedagogy course two hours a week during the semester. In the first part, they discuss weekly teaching and learning experiences that went well (wins) and those that could be improved (opportunities). In part two, LAs undergo training on teaching and learning, allowing them to conceptualize how these methods would be used in the classroom.

Previously, Moore and his team uncovered five common challenging interactions that LAs may face in the classroom. To help the LAs navigate these interactions, scenarions were developed by Moore's research team. LAs roleplay the scenarios and then discuss what they would do if they faced similar situations. The training allows LAs to develop strategies to navigate these teaching challenges and receive advice from their peers and instructor.

"What happens if you are a learning assistant, and you have a friend who tries to leverage their friend status to get information for class?" Moore said. "Learning assistants read scenarios and then talk about how they might handle these situations."

When COVID-19 forced many college classes to go online, Moore found that the LA pedagogy training needed to be modified to help the LAs prepare for challenging scenarios that could arise in an online learning environment.

"An example of one of these scenarios is that you are having an online class while a student is doing laundry," Moore said. "How do you help that student learn that is not the best use of their time, and they should be paying attention to class? We talk about how you would handle it if you were in that situation. All of these are examples of proactive instead of reactive training. We train students so they know how to act before these situations happen."

The paper assessed whether learning assistants received adequate training for working in an online environment. Five new challenging interaction scenarios were created to show how classroom situations might evolve in an online environment. An example of a difficult scenario is trying to get a student to participate in a classroom review when they consistently keep their cameras turned off.

"Our article showed that there was a reason to rewrite these scenarios from an online perspective," Moore said. "We talked about how these challenges manifest differently in face-to-face and online environments."

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