High Structure Course Design Improves Student Belonging
High structure course design can deliver many positive benefits, including improving student belonging. Read this article to see how Mike Wilton, Eduardo Gonzalez-Niño, and colleagues show how high structure improved their introductory biology students' performance and sense of belonging.
We describe here two parallel sections of Introductory Biology that shared learning objectives and content but varied in course structure. We showed that academic achievement and retention of participants enrolled in the intervention course was significantly improved when compared with the traditional section. At the end of the course, participants in the intervention course reported greater perceptions of classroom belonging. Therefore, this study begins to characterize the importance of combining pedagogical methods that promote both academic success and belonging to effectively improve retention in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics majors.