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Teach a Person to Fish: Report on a Paired Biology
& Study Skills Course at Spokane Falls Community College
by Jan Swinton
At Spokane Falls Community College, Introductory Biology has traditionally been a challenging class for science as well as nonscience majors. Many beginning and returning students are confronting for the first time, the challenge of having to learn a great deal of technical material at a rapid pace. In response, biology instructor Diana DeFelice and English/Reading instructor Jan Swinton have paired Biology 101 with a Study Skills class in two modes. Though the makeup and format of the two differ somewhat, the goals have been the same: to help students learn biology and pass the course with a C or better; to help students learn study strategies that they could use immediately in the biology course as well as in other classes; and to help students develop more personal responsibility for their learning.
"I was taking a ‘teach a person to fish’ approach in this project," says Jan Swinton. "If we could teach the students HOW to learn biology, and not just the biology, they could take this approach to other classes. I wanted the students to recognize that learning is their responsibility, no matter how tough the textbook and no matter how complex and fast-moving the lectures are."
Under the auspices of a seed grant from the Washington Center, DeFelice and Swinton first offered introductory biology and developmental-level study skills as a paired class spring quarter of 1990. This augmented a variety of learning community paired class and coordinated studies programs already being offered at the college. The program had capacity for 25 students and was open only to freshmen and sophomores who had scored below average on the reading and writing assessment tests. The class met with both instructors present for a two-hour block each day, and there was an additional biology lab component. At the end of the quarter, the students and instructors agreed that the study skills component was rigorous enough to warrant transfer credit, and to be made available to all students, not just ones who had tested at developmental levels. In the fall of 1993, DeFelice and Swinton offered a double section of Biology 101 paired with a five credit, transfer-level study skills course. Approximately 50 percent of the 40 students were developmental as determined by their Asset placement test scores.
With both paired classes, the students’ final grade distribution differed significantly from the grades of students who had taken regular free-standing sections of Biology 101 from DeFelice in previous quarters. The major difference in the spring 1990 paired class was the reduced number of Ds and Fs compared to a free-standing class. DeFelice comments, "Typically, a significant number of students receive As and Bs, a significant number earn Ds and Fs, and only a few are in the middle Cs. This creates an inverted curve, which isn’t unusual in beginning science classes." The more bell-shaped grade distribution in the first paired class is particularly noteworthy in that all of the students were developmental students. Likewise, fewer students in the fall 1993 paired classes received Ds and Fs than students in a regular free-standing double section of Biology 101 taught by DeFelice during the fall quarter of 1992.
Other evidence of learning included the students’ lecture and textbook notes, which reflected a variety of study strategies learned during the quarter. The faculty team observed these notes were more organized, readable and complete than those students not enrolled in the paired class. While the traditional biology text (Staff and Taggart’s Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life) was required, each student created his or her own resource notebook of study strategies, handouts and materials relating to time management and test taking instead of purchasing a "study skills" textbook. Also, students monitored their learning by completing weekly journal assignments on topics such as their study habits and attitudes, learning difficulties and successes. It was enormously rewarding to both instructors, then, to hear Joe, a 40 year-old nursing student who had failed biology the previous quarter, say, "The thing about it is that by using all of these methods and doing the group study, I know I learned biology." Practicing new and various study strategies, students were better able to learn biology; likewise, a difficult-to-master content provided students with extra incentive to try new strategies and learn about themselves as learners.
For the faculty members, the rewards were not just the students’ success. "Participating in another instructor’s class, preferably in a content area foreign to one’s own discipline, is one of the most powerful faculty-development activities available to instructors," comments Swinton, who also serves as the faculty development coordinator for Spokane Falls. "I hadn’t taken a life science course since my freshman year of high school! Pairing my course with another course forced me to reassess the most critical elements of the study skills curriculum. I found that some study strategies that I usually taught in my study skills course simply weren’t efficient or effective for learning biology. What an eye-opener! I’m now convinced that it’s far more meaningful to teach (and learn) study skills in the context of a demanding course."
DeFelice concurs. "It’s been a wonderful experience to work with Jan. She showed me and the students so many ways of learning biological concepts. I didn’t think this was possible, but these approaches work! Also, the two-hour block of time enabled us to do some things I never could have fitted in otherwise. In Biology 101 we mostly emphasize cellular biology (genetics and reproductive biology) but don’t always have time for other areas of biology, such as ecology, that are very much part of our lives. At the end of the fall 1993 quarter, the students read The Naturalist in Alaska by Adolf Murie, and then, in groups, researched and reported on various species of animals that live within the wolf’s environment. They got to know animals they weren’t familiar with, and they got interested and excited. This project gave them a chance to do library research, to integrate information, and to produce something understandable and sometimes entertaining. I have now begun to try out some of these things in my stand-alone biology classes. I’m asking my students to communicate more about what and how they are learning."
For further information including a 10 minute video of students discussing the merits of taking this pairing, contact Jan Swinton, Spokane Falls Community College, M.S. 3050, W. 3410 Fort George Wright Drive, Spokane, WA 99204.
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