A poster-session review to reinforce course concepts and improve scientific communication skills.

INTRODUCTION

A poster session can be included in undergraduate biology courses to help students in several ways: monitor their understanding of course material, learn by teaching others, and develop their scientific communication skills. Poster sessions are a familiar component of scientific meetings, and this model has been adapted for the classroom to allow students to share their research or explore areas of personal interest (1, 2). A more novel approach is the use of a poster-session review to help reinforce important course concepts, as described in this paper.

In preparation for the cumulative final exam, students in my upper-division genetics course participate in a poster-session review. For this assignment, each student becomes an expert on a previously covered topic, creates a small poster to summarize it, and presents their work for the class. This allows students to: master material on their own (while making their poster), monitor their understanding (while answering questions about their poster), and assess their knowledge (while viewing other posters). It also gives them practice conveying scientific information visually and orally, two communication formats that are not widely experienced at the undergraduate level.

A poster-session review can be implemented in any undergraduate biology course from the introductory to the advanced level. This approach works best in a laboratory or recitation where the number of students is generally under 30, but it can also be adapted for a small lecture class.

PROCEDURE

Students are randomly assigned well-defined topics covering all the sections of the course (Appendix 1) and provided with instructions for creating a poster that summarizes the key concepts within their topic. To help set parameters, students are given manila file folders and asked to fit their poster within the space of an open folder. (The intention is for students to use any medium they chose directly on the folder, not to have them create a poster in a presentation program.) In addition to the visual presentation, students prepare a three- to five-minute oral summary of their poster. To encourage students to further identify key concepts, they are asked to write two multiple-choice questions that could come from the material. I have found it very helpful to provide students with several examples of effective and ineffective posters before they begin the project.

The poster-session review occurs during my weekly general genetics recitation, but it could also take place in a laboratory or small lecture. On the day of the poster-session review, students use masking tape to display their work around the room. Students are divided into two groups based on the number of their poster topic. In the first part of the poster session, students with odd-numbered topics present their posters while the other group circulates. In the second part of the poster session, the groups switch. If time allows, presenters within the same group can see each other’s work by going on a tour of their posters together. In an hour-long class period, each student is able to visit three to five posters during their circulation session.

Students have advance access to a complete list of topics and are encouraged to visit posters in areas they find challenging. They are also given a handout for taking notes during the poster-session review. The questions on the handout are designed to stimulate metacognition. On the day of the poster-session review, students are asked to write what they remember about a topic before they view a poster, take notes while visiting a poster, and write any questions that remain after talking with the presenter. These notes are checked for completeness by the instructor or a graduate teaching assistant, and returned to each student for use during their final exam studying.

Each student’s poster, presentation, and pair of predicted exam questions are graded using a rubric (Appendix 2) and feedback is given the following week. The project is worth approximately one-fourth of an exam grade.

CONCLUSION

The effect of participating was self-reported by genetics students who gave informed consent to be surveyed before and after a poster-session review in the fall of 2011. Following the poster-session review, 95.5% of respondents either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I remember and understand this topic” with regard to their assigned topic as compared to only 67.3% of respondents prior to the assignment (Fig. 1). The shift in the extent to which students agreed with this statement was statistically significant by Fisher’s exact test (p < 10−5) (Fig. 1). Students also reported on other potential benefits of the poster-session review. Using a Likert scale (where 5 = Strongly Agree), the mean response was 4.06 for “This assignment will help me do better on the final exam” and 3.81 for “This assignment helped improve my scientific communication skills” (Fig. 2).

FIGURE 1

Student-reported increase in understanding of poster topics. Students were asked to rate the extent to which they agreed with the statement “I remember and understand this topic” with regard to their randomly assigned poster topic (n = 110). The shift in responses following the poster-session review is significant as determined by Fisher’s exact test (p < 10−5).

FIGURE 2

Student-reported benefits of participating in the poster-session review. Students rated the degree to which they agreed with the statements: “This assignment will help me do better on the final exam” and “This assignment helped improve my scientific communication skills,” using a Likert scale (where 5 = Strongly Agree). The means of 110 responses are shown, with error bars representing the standard deviation.

In summary, the majority of the students reported that participating in the poster-session review helped them master a topic from genetics and prepare for the final exam. The students also indicated that it helped improve their scientific communication skills. This activity can be adapted for a variety of biology courses to meet similar goals.

Appendix 1: List of poster-session review topics

Appendix 2: Poster-session review grading rubric