Abstract
Background:
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Effective teaching and learning is a major challenge in large class teaching. This gets more significant in foundation courses in which newly admitted students are with diverse training background. Along with the board-based undergraduate admission, bioscience courses with student enrollment reaching 100 or more are common in School of Life Sciences.
Objectives:
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This project aims to develop Peer-Assisted Learning (PAL) to enhance teaching and learning in five bioscience courses with large class size.
Methodology:
- We will recruit senior year life sciences students to build a team of Peer Teaching Assistants (pTAs). Guided training will be provided to pTAs who will later lead small group tutorials. In addition to classrooms, web conferencing will be adopted to bring more flexibility in the tutorials. Our scheme will be carried out in different phases including pTAs recruitment and training, preparation of teaching materials and evaluations.
Expected outcomes and deliverables:
- The PAL suite will create an interactive peer-learning environment for over 700 students to strengthen their learning and engagement. A collection of pTAs-led tutorials and teaching materials will be produced. Through the development of PAL, we will establish a credit-bearing course “Internship in bioscience teaching” to provide training for science students interested in education.
