Recitation-style Sessions
(50 min sessions, typically in addition to lecture and can be optional or required)
Typical Learning Environment
Approximately 20-25 students per 50-minute meeting in groups of 4 or 5. One LA and one graduate TA co-facilitate entire session.
What Do Students Do?
Students work in groups on challenging activities or carefully sequenced questions that can help them build conceptual understanding or problem solving sophistication. Students are expected to defend their reasoning and negotiate meaning with their peers.
What Do LAs Do?
LAs
circulate around the classroom listening and observing groups as they work through discussion worthy questions or context-rich problems,
engage students in Socratic dialog, asking probing questions about the groups’ current thinking that can help lead students toward productive discussions,
facilitate student discussions about the questions and problems.
Materials Needed
Guided-inquiry based activity documents or sets of well-sequenced questions that allow students to articulate, defend, and modify their ideas. For examples, see:
Tutorials for Introductory Physics https://sharepoint.washington.edu/phys/ugrad/tutorials
PER User’s Guide http://perusersguide.org
Minnesota’s Context-Rich Problems http://groups.physics.umn.edu/physed/Research/CRP/crintro.html
Process-Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) https://pogil.org
Large (1meter × ¾ meter), mobile, dry-erase boards are useful for students to build ideas, work problems, and modify ideas collaboratively as a group.
Tables that allow students to sit in groups of 4-6.
The Numbers
LA to Student Ratio
1 LA per 25-30 students for each session, each LA facilitates 3 of the same sessions per week
Hiring Needs
1 LA per 60 - 80 students in the course
Coordination with Other Course Components
Typically, recitation-type sessions co-occur with a class that meets 3 - 4 times a week. Recitation sessions are often scheduled throughout the week, but some departments manage to get all the recitations for the course scheduled on a single day of the week, between two of the class days.
Variations and Suggestions
Two LAs can facilitate each session instead of an LA and a TA.
These session may be either a regular part of the lecture course, an additional 1-credit course, or an optional study session.
One option is to cancel one lecture per week and run recitations sessions instead which may allow for more small group work and individual attention for students.
Experienced LAs can run an additional recitation section per week in addition to serving as an LA in the lecture course.