Categories: GSI Online Library, Teaching Effectiveness Award Essays
By Dev Desai, Molecular and Cell Biology
Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2026
In the first third of MCB102 (Survey of Biochemistry), a course notorious for its steep learning curve, two recurring concerns emerged from students during my discussion sections: the expectations for the upcoming midterm were unclear, and there were insufficient practice problems to prepare effectively. Generating new practice problems myself was outside the scope of my role as a GSI, and the time constraints of a weekly 50-minute section left little room for comprehensive review. The deeper pedagogical issue, I thought, was not simply a resource gap. Students were approaching exam preparation passively, waiting to be told what mattered instead of engaging critically with the material themselves.
To address this, I adapted the jigsaw activity for an exam review section. In the first half, I divided students into five ‘expert groups’ and assigned each group a subset of the preceding lectures. Each group generated three to five exam-style questions for their assigned material and submitted them through a Google Form. As submissions came in, I reviewed and edited them, adding sub-questions, and adjusting format to align with the problem sets students had previously encountered. This ensured the questions were rigorous enough to serve as genuine exam preparation. The edited questions were then compiled into a shared Google Doc.
In the second half, I reshuffled students into new groups, each containing at least one author of each question set. Therefore, each group had a peer who could explain the reasoning behind their questions: why a particular concept was chosen, what trap they intended to construct, what they had found genuinely confusing. This peer explanation dynamic emerged naturally and produced exactly the kind of active engagement that passive review does not. Rather than working through problems on the board, I walked around and responded to specific questions as they arose. After the section, I wrote an answer key and added it to the same Google Doc, giving students a resource for continued review.
The assessment of this activity was primarily qualitative. Multiple students said they felt more confident going into the midterm, not simply because they had more practice material, but because constructing and explaining questions had clarified what they knew and what they did not. Notably, students requested the same activity for both subsequent midterms. Two limitations were worth noting: first, the topics students prioritized did not fully align with my own sense of what was important for the exam. I addressed this by adding a supplementary topic list to the same Google Doc. Second, 50 minutes was obviously not sufficient for comprehensive review, so the Google Doc and answer key served as a take-home resource as well. The student response — particularly the quality of peer discussion observed during the section — suggested the core objective was met: students engaged actively with the material!