The Impact of Supplemental Instruction on the Learning Achievements and Attitudes of Organic Chemistry Students

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Supplemental Instruction (SI) has been a successful implementation into Colleges and Universities across the globe. SI has been found to reduce attrition and improve learning and success rate among participating students. At the City College of New York, we recently implemented SI into Organic Chemistry I courses to further support struggling students with the content and concept learning of Organic Chemistry, which is considered a difficult course with a high attrition rate. Our motivation for this research was to examine the impact of SI integration in a large lecture format Organic Chemistry course while assisting students learn and succeed in this challenging course. The objective of this research is to examine whether supplemental instruction (SI) impacts participants’ learning achievement, attitudes, and learning competencies. The experimental design was based on a quasi-experimental approach which included a questionnaire of open-ended and Likert-scaled questions that was distributed to SI participants, and SI participants’ grades were compared to the grades of non-SI participants. Data suggest that integrating Supplemental Instruction (SI) into Organic Chemistry courses positively impacts students’ attitudes towards the content and experience in the course, helps them better understand concepts and materials, improves students’ problem-solving skills, and is effective in improving students’ achievement, success, and the learning. SI participants had an overall passing average of 81%, compared to about 50% for non-SI participants. SI participation provided the participants with a unique and individualized learning experience that resulted in an enhanced conceptual understanding.