Does it Matter if Students Have the Same Instructor for Both Lecture and Lab Sections? An Analysis of Introductory Biology Students

Michael Joseph Wise

doi:10.14434/v17i1.19583

Abstract

With the goal of increasing the immediacy of the relationship between tenure-track professors and students, science departments in liberal arts colleges may try to arrange their curriculum so that students have the same professor in both the lecture and the lab section of introductory courses. While this goal seems laudable, empirical data are currently lacking to justify the logistical hurdles and professional sacrifices likely required to match professors to students in both lecture and lab sections of large courses. To address this data gap, I analyzed student evaluations and grades from three years of an introductory biology course that included separate lecture and lab sections. There was no evidence that matching a student’s lecture and lab instructor had any benefit on either the students’ perception of the effectiveness of the labs, or on the students’ performance in their lab or lecture sections. In addition, there was no consistent pattern in students’ perceptions of the relative effectiveness of tenure-track professors, visiting professors, and adjunct instructors. This study suggests that students may even benefit from having different instructors in their lecture and lab, whether they are tenured professors, visiting professors, or part-time adjuncts.

Highlights

The traditional approach for teaching introductory science courses is to split the course into one or a few large lecture sections and multiple small laboratory sections
Smaller liberal arts colleges generally follow a similar model of a large lecture and small lab sections; without graduate teaching assistants, both the lecture and lab sections must be taught by faculty (Kezar, Maxey, & Eaton, 2014; Sundberg, Armstrong, & Wischusen, 2005)
For the three years of this study on the introductory-level Principles of Biology course at Roanoke College, there was no general trend indicating that students had a better experience when they had the same instructor for both lecture and lab than when the lecture and lab instructors differed

Summary

Introduction

The traditional approach for teaching introductory science courses is to split the course into one or a few large lecture sections and multiple small laboratory sections. In research and comprehensive universities, the lectures are likely to be taught by tenure-track professors, while the lab sections are handled by a team of graduate students (Kendall & Schussler, 2012, 2014). In liberal arts colleges as well as research universities, there has been a movement away from the traditional lecture-lab split toward a “studio” approach (a.k.a., blended, integrated, selfcontained, or active learning) in which class meetings consist of short lectures that are interspersed with hands-on, student-centered activities (Beichner & Saul, 2003; Gonzalez, 2014; Hoellwarth, Moelter, & Knight, 2005). One purported advantage of the studio approach is that it enables students to forge a closer, more immediate relationship with their professor than they can as passive

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Conclusion