Biology recitation class helps students master concepts

A recitation class for Biology 111, the first course taken by biology majors, was offered during fall quarter this year after two-thirds of the course’s students in 2014-2015 attended at least half of the newly created recitation sessions.

Recitation was offered to help students master the course content and build good study habits. During recitation students have an opportunity to discuss questions in groups, practice test questions and go over problematic topics with the class professor and teaching assistants. During a test study session last year, assistant biology professor Arturo Diaz posed questions game show-style to a room full of students who used colored cards with letters to give answers.

“We’re trying to provide extra help to get them on the right track,” Diaz said. “Overall we’ve gotten very positive feedback from the students.

“We noticed that a large portion of the incoming freshmen had poor study skills and their reasoning skills were not at a high enough level to succeed in a rigorous college course,” Diaz said. “A number of students do not realize that college requires a higher level of commitment involving a variety of learning skills, such as deep reading, purposeful study, critical thinking, or even asking for help. Like any skill set, critical thinking needs to be taught and cultivated and recitation is the first step in this process.”

The class is the brainchild of biology professor Nathan Sutter and Diaz. Working with professor Sandy Balli from the School of Education, recitation is structured on a cooperative learning model that encourages students to help each other. Students are grouped in threes to go over class material and find answers to questions. A group consensus answer is then presented to the class for further discussion.

During the initial rollout in the fall of 2014, four Biology 111 recitation sessions were offered with 60 percent of the total course enrollment attending recitations.

Students who attended the pilot rollout last year commented on the impact it had on their performance.

“I always heard terrible things about how rigorous and hard biology was,” said biology student and future dentist Ronia Ali. “I knew that if help was offered multiple times throughout the week, I should take advantage of it. Recitation was amazing and helped me stay on track as well as train my mind to target what was really important. I passed Bio 111 with an A- and I am strongly thanking the person who created recitation.”

Student Julius Daniels who also participated in one of last year’s pilot sessions said the experience provided him among other things, a “non-threatening environment to thoroughly learn concepts poorly grasped [or] missed during the regular class session, get a better idea of what is important for the professor, better prepare for a quiz [or] exam, realize that my professor cared enough about my success to allocate time beyond regular hours,” he said. “I think a recitation should be adopted by the additional levels of biology as well as for the chemistry and physics courses.”

Overall, the first year’s results showed recitation attendance to be “positively correlated with course performance,” Diaz said. “While this does not indicate causality, it points to the positive learning environment available to students in recitation. The median course percentage for regular attendees -- those attending in five or more weeks -- was about 20 percent higher than the median percentage for non-attendees.

“Therefore, the recitation room may offer a value we didn’t anticipate -- it concentrates the higher-performing students and may provide them a high-value learning environment in the process,” he said.