Biology Courses Using Supplemental Instruction

BIOL 204 (Introduction to Life Sciences) was redesigned as a Biology Boot Camp in Fall of 2014. The redesigned BIOL 204 was offered as a 40 hour course the week prior to the academic year (as a BIO 195). The target audience was students between their Freshman and Sophomore years who struggled to pass chemistry and math courses. The first offering was as a BIO 195 pilot. We have found that this population often fails the first core biology course, and thus this is a bottleneck to graduation. We explored ways to offer it as a hybrid or online and with virtual labs in order to prepare students for the real lab experiences, which are much more costly. The intent is for the students to form a learning community and to continue with Supplemental Instruction heading forward into the fall se<br /> mester. We found that the students in the cohort performed slightly better than the class average (CHEM 210 class average 70% pass rate, cohort 71% pass rate), even though that population typically had an almost complete failure rate. All of the students passed at least one component (lab or lecture), and they also all passed the chemistry they were taking concurrently. Because of the success, we have implemented similar type of student discussion and support as BIO 295 going forward.