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Learning environments are vastly different across in-person and remote instruction. In undergraduate STEM courses, learning assistants (LAs) have been working in both settings, however, little is known about how the affordances and constraints of each setting influence LA facilitation practices in small group interactions. Thus, in our study, we explore the ways different contextual factors act as drivers of LA actions in both contexts of a hybrid course, and how these LA actions influence student in-the-moment learning. To do so, we recorded LA-student interactions and conducted interviews with the professor and LAs of a hybrid general chemistry course. We used a sociocultural perspective to provide an explanatory account for the drivers of action on LA facilitation practices and student learning, which revealed the following: When LA purposes/goals and social context were the same, but the conditions and means by which they could enact these purposes/goals were different between the in-person and remote conditions, LAs took different actions in each setting resulting in differences with respect to student in-the-moment learning. With our examples, we present evidence that there are multiple conditional factors that drive LA actions during LA-student interactions. Implications for theory and reform of practice will be discussed. 

Characterizing different enactments of instructional reform approaches is key to improving science education. The Learning Assistant (LA) model leads to many positive student outcomes in a wide range of STEM courses. However, discrepancies in outcomes in different introductory STEM courses have led to a call for more work investigating how the LA model is implemented. This multiple-case study seeks to bridge that gap by providing a high-resolution comparison of three LA-facilitated physics and chemistry courses at two institutions. We used cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) to characterize the activity systems of LA-facilitated interactions and the whole class discussion immediately following these interactions, to understand how instructors leveraged these interactions in their instruction and the roles LAs played in that integration. We found that integrating small group interactions lies on a spectrum based on the extent to which the instructors used student ideas (developed during small group discussion) as mediating artifacts in the whole class discussion, enabled by different divisions of labor and driven by instructors’ different goals. Furthermore, we found that LAs provided both conceptual and emotional support to students to support the integration. Implications for teaching with LAs, and for research on instructional reform more broadly will be discussed.