Is Gallery Walk an Effective Teaching and Learning Strategy for Biology?

Abstract

A teacher may use gallery walk as a strategy to allow students to share their work with peers and to examine learning materials in the classroom. In this study, A-level biology students were divided into four groups to present information about cardiovascular diseases. Students’ feedback on gallery walk as an alternative teaching and learning strategy was collected in a form of simple questionnaire. 71.4 % of students could understand the lesson they need to present before their friends, and equal percentage of students understood the lesson presented by their friends, indicating that gallery walk could be a suitable learning strategy for factual lessons like cardiovascular diseases. This strategy was found to be interesting for learning to 66.7 % of the students. However, only 28.6 % of the students agreed that gallery walk strategy was more effective than teacher’s didactic method of presenting the lesson, and 66.6 % of the students hope to learn biology lessons with similar strategy. We conclude that what students found to be interesting may not necessarily be effective for learning biology and argue that didactic approach to teaching biology could still be very relevant even for the Y and Z generation of learners.