By Kaitlyn G Fitzgerald (Azusa Pacific University)
Information
A Learning Assistants (LA) program is a “near peer” model of curricular and student support in college classrooms that began in physics education (Otero, V., Pollock, S., & Finkelstein, N., 2010). An LA is a student who has previously been successful in a course and is hired to collaborate with faculty as part of the instructional team. They attend class sessions with primary goals of building community and facilitating active learning, and they meet weekly with their faculty instructor to provide feedback and collaboratively plan for upcoming class sessions. This presentation provides evidence from an NSF-funded research study that evaluates the effectiveness of an LA program at a small private Hispanic Serving Institution where we have employed LAs in over 30 course sections of 100-level STEM courses from Fall 2023 to Spring 2025, including 6 sections of Introduction to Statistics. We find that exposure to an LA is associated with lower DFW rates and higher retention rates, especially for Hispanic students and STEM majors. LA exposure does not appear to have much direct influence on students’ sense of STEM identity or career interests, but qualitative data suggests that being employed as a Learning Assistant can strengthen an LA’s sense of belonging in STEM and broaden perspectives on who “can do STEM.” In addition to the research data, we will discuss implementation strategies and lessons learned for effectively utilizing LAs in statistics classrooms. Finally, we’ll discuss how LAs have been used to support curricular change and faculty development at our institution.