Transition and Alignment in First-Year University Courses
This project investigates how alignment across lectures, TA sessions, and assessment practices can improve the first-year experience in mathematics and physics.
This project investigates pedagogical designs that integrate AI-supported tools to strengthen coherence and engagement and explores how feedback and assessment can be reimagined as more relational and dialogic. The project aims to support smoother transitions into university study and improve retention in high-failure-rate courses.
University mathematics and physics education continues to face persistent challenges related to student engagement, learning, and retention, often reflecting misalignments between lectures, teaching assistant (TA) sessions/tutorials, laboratory or field-based activities, and assessment practices. This project addresses these challenges by investigating learning environments as the central integrative unit through which teaching, feedback, use of artefacts and disciplinary participation are enacted in concrete university settings. The overall aim is to generate disciplinesensitive, empirically grounded knowledge about how alignment is produced, negotiated, and sometimes disrupted across interconnected instructional and assessment contexts in mathematics and physics.
WP Leader: Associate Professor Dorte Moeskær Larsen, SDU
Lead Researcher: PhD Student Katrine von Bornemann Hjelmborg, SDU
In comparison with other educational levels, university-level mathematics often involves a dual teaching structure in which carrying out teaching is divided evenly between lectures and tutorials, led by instructors and teaching assistants, respectively. Teaching assistants frequently bear substantial responsibility for students’ engagement with core course content; yet their pedagogical preparation, role definition, and institutional positioning remain under-theorised and under-documented in the research literature (Speer, Gutmann, & Murphy, 2005).
RQ1: How can teaching and learning strategies shape the design and enactment of tutorial sessions in university mathematics, enhancing student learning environments while focusing on alignment with corresponding lectures?
RQ2: How do teaching assistants in mathematics perceive, negotiate, and enact their instructional role in tutorials, and how can their professional development be structed?
RQ3: How can collaboration between teaching assistants and instructors be organized and supported to improve alignment across tutorials, lectures, and course content, while fostering ongoing reflection and professional growth for teaching assistants within enriched learning environments?
WP Leader: Associate Professor Dorte Moeskær Larsen, SDU
Lead Researcher: Assistant Professor Maiken Westen Holm Svendsen, SDU
This work approaches feedback and assessment not as a neutral measurement tool, but as a performative apparatus (Barad, 2007) that shapes learning environments, participation, and possibilities for agency. Feedback and assessment practices are understood as a learning environment in its own right - one that unfolds across time, space, and material arrangements.
Teaching assistant (TA) sessions and laboratory work in university mathematics and physics education are examined as assessment-inflected learning environments, where students encounter disciplinary expectations through problem solving, feedback, and interaction. These environments function as everyday sites where assessment logics are enacted in practice, often implicitly, through judgements of correctness, relevance, and value. Formal examinations, in turn, are approached as intensified assessment environments in which performativity, accountability, and epistemic authority become
particularly visible.
This work package investigates how feedback and assessment practices unfold across these interconnected environments, focusing on how feedback, participation, and agency are shaped through feedback and assessment practices in both TA sessions and formal examinations environments. By analysing those practices as a structuring force across learning environments, WP2 seeks to make visible how they may either constrain or enable students’ engagement with deep disciplinary mathematics and physics knowledge, and how alternative configurations might support forms of epistemic agency that move
beyond performative compliance.
We therefore ask the following research questions:
RQ1: How are assessment and feedback practices enacted across different learning environments in university mathematics and physics, including lectures, TA sessions, practical or field-based activities, and examinations, and how do these practices shape what becomes learnable, sayable, and assessable within the disciplines?
RQ2: How do feedback and assessment practices across different learning environments relate to one another, particularly in terms of alignment or misalignment between everyday assessment practices and summative examinations, and how do these relations shape students’ disciplinary expectations, study strategies, and epistemic agency over time?
RQ3: What organisational, material, pedagogical, and technological conditions support the development of feedback and assessment practices in practical and exercise-based sessions, and how can insights from these conditions inform iterative refinements of teaching, feedback and assessment practices across mathematics and physics courses?
