Importance Of Academic Support In Biology

Ashley Buick

Brenda Pashley

PAC Experience

27 October 2022

Biology Content Support

Metacognition is the ability to be mindful of one's own thinking. In other words, it "involves understanding the learning task, making choices about how to effectively engage in it, and gauging how well these strategies are working" (Hensley 2021). In an academic support context, the student must recognize their strengths and weaknesses as a learner and know what strategies to use for several types of content. The student should be conscious of what approaches they use for learning. For example, their study strategies for organismal biology versus molecular biology, and their strategies for lecture content versus laboratory content, should be different.

If a group of students during a session have all come in for the same reason (review session, help with a worksheet, assistance with a post-lab, etc.), we should allow the students to help each other. This provides help for the students who need it and gives other students the opportunity to teach what they know, further solidifying what they have learned, as well as "allow[s] students to learn collaboratively with peers, while being guided by a peer leader" (Jebanesan 2016). This would have a similar framework to the chemistry department's Peer-Led Team Learning, except that there is a looser structure, and the coaches would be slightly less involved. This might look like students peer-editing each other's lab reports or reviewing course content in preparation for an exam. Another way this is beneficial is because the students are often in the same class, so they can teach the others the way the professor taught it in class, whereas the coaches might not be able to remember how their professor taught it to them, or if they did not have the same professor, how they want the student to know certain concepts. For example, biology professors focus on their niche fields of biology when teaching their introductory courses, such as microbiology versus molecular biology. Each professor stresses the importance of various aspects of biology. Other setups for facilitated discussions are "rotation stations," "chalk talk," and "snowballing," among others (Sutton-Grier 2016). Rotation stations are when a larger group splits into smaller sections. Each section produces a question and brainstorms the answer. The questions are rotated between groups so that each group produces answers for each one. Chalk talk is similar, except each student answers a question individually and then they group together to discuss their answers. Snowballing is when a question is given and each person produces an