Students who attended eight or more supplemental instruction sessions last semester received 24 percent more As and Bs in their courses than students who did not attend SI.
The extra instruction, facilitated by undergraduate students, is an organized class study group to help students improve their grades in traditionally difficult courses, Amanda Remnant, assistant director of Supplemental Instruction, said.
Working collaboratively is an important aspect of SI because it allows students to better retain the information, said SI leader Alex Harrell.
“The students are required in every session to work with each other,” Harrell, a fifth-year pre-med student who leads the Chemistry 1210 and 1220 SI sessions, said. “If you’re just sitting in lecture, you retain only 5 percent of the information after 24 hours. When you teach others, you retain 90 percent.”
Harrell typically has at least 20 students at each of her sessions, a number that drastically increases during the week before an exam.
“It’s open for anyone to show up,” Harrell said. “It’s a totally free and voluntary thing.”
Harrell also said that SI offers a different benefit than tutoring services do.
“With tutoring, you have to go in with questions prepared,” Harrell said. “But with SI, since I sit in on the class every day, I build a worksheet for my SI students to go with the daily class.”
When the program started in 1988, it offered instruction in two courses: Sociology 101 and Psychology 101. Now in its 27th year, the program includes 18 courses, including those in accounting, biology, chemistry, math, and physics.
“When I was a freshman, I attended SI for BIOS 1030,” Alison Vieira, a junior studying communication sciences and disorders, said. “I had a great SI leader and she helped me out immensely in the course. I ended up getting a B+ in the course when I thought I would have gotten a C.”
Vieira now serves as an SI leader herself.
Together with 29 SI leaders, the program logged 17,714 total contact hours with students last semester. The data collected each term shows that students who consistently attend SI sessions earn a half to a whole letter grade better than those who do not attend, Remnant said.
“The key is consistent use, not just attending right before the test,” she said.
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