Interns were given several biology, chemistry, and physics laboratory classes to choose from, and were expected to dedicate 4 to 8 hours per week to the program, including time for lab preparation, teaching, and grading.
C-PFOA (surrogate) was also added to every sample before extraction to assess lab preparation.
To maximize the utility of PD during lab preparation meetings, schools should try to minimize time for parts of lab preparation sessions that are less important (like supply lists or setups) and maximize time spent on instructional support for GTAs.
Others have advocated using lab preparation meetings as explicit venues for GTA instructional preparation (Nurrenbern et al., 1999; Trautwein, 1999; Wyse et al., 2014).
The most common in-semester PD was found to take place during lab preparation meetings, with 40% of schools reporting this was mandatory.
Traditional lab preparation time is usually spent on reviewing the lab protocols and equipment/supplies (French and Russell, 2002; Wyse et al., 2014), suggesting that time for PD may be limited if it is provided in this context.
Of these, 31 schools (48%) had no additional PD requirements, while 34 schools (52%) had additional in-semester requirements, such as a departmental seminar or PD during lab preparation meetings.
Finally, 40% of the respondents indicated that PD during lab preparation meetings was mandatory for their GTAs, 31% said it was not offered, and 12% said it was optional.
However, there are models for how to integrate PD into lab preparation effectively (Nurrenbern et al., 1999; French and Russell, 2002; Wyse et al., 2014), and these sessions have the potential to provide continuous PD over a semester and be firmly situated within the discipline-specific and pedagogy-specific nature of labs (Brown et al., 1989).
It was difficult to sort into the "seminar during teaching semester" and "formal college course" categories, because it was unknown how Rushin and colleagues would categorize PD during lab preparation meetings (which was a fairly common form of PD on our survey).
