Teaching assistants typically receive no special training for these sessions. This method was developed by Lillian McDermott and the Physics Education Group at the University of Washington to improve student understanding of fundamental physics concepts in a cost-effective manner within the traditional lecture structure. This test asks qualitative conceptual questions about the subject to be covered in tutorial the following week. The teaching assistants and faculty involved participate in a 1.5 hour weekly training session. Students work in groups of three or four and answer questions on a worksheet that walks them through building qualitative reasoning on a fundamental concept.
Students have a brief qualitative homework assignment in which they explain their reasoning.
This is in part of their weekly homework which also includes problems assigned from the text. A question emphasizing material from tutorials is asked on each examination. In this approach, situations are presented which trigger the common student difficulties revealed by research. The facilitators then help those students who show the predicted difficulties work through their ideas themselves. We supplemented them by a number of tutorials we developed ourselves in the same framework.