Categories: GSI Online Library, Teaching Effectiveness Award Essays
By Anna Scharnagl, Integrative Biology
Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2025
It is not commonplace for the position of GSI to be involved in curriculum redesign or other changes to a course’s structure, but I have been fortunate enough to be able to teach courses here at UC Berkeley where my involvement in such changes was permitted and encouraged.
One of the courses for which this was the case was Human Biological Variation, IB35AC. This course has a heavy biology component yet is open to non-majors and to all levels of undergraduate students as it fulfills the UC Berkeley American Cultures requirement. As part of this requirement, it includes a large writing assignment – the Final Essay, due at the end of the semester and designed to showcase the culmination of the students’ knowledge in one of five key topic areas from the course. When I taught this course in spring 2023, I noticed that the performance on the Final Essay varied a lot, with a wide array of writing styles and proficiency, as well as very different levels of scholarship demonstrated in the papers. It appeared to me that this was the result of the Final Essay being assigned at the beginning of class, but no other guidance or feedback was given prior to the whole thing being due at the end of the term. This not only made writing difficult for the students, with high evidence of a lot of very last minute “off-the-cuff” papers but also made grading very difficult for the GSIs.
I was already collaborating with the course instructor on ideas of how to improve this writing assignment for all, when I was able to teach the course again in spring 2024 and implement my ideas on redesigning this assignment. To get the students thinking about the essay earlier than the last week of class, I created staggered smaller parts to be due throughout the semester. The first tiny piece due a third of the way in was a choice of topic with a brief justification for their interest in that choice. The second piece due after the midterm exam but before spring break was a draft of their introduction which needed to include some background or context and a clear thesis statement as part of either an expository or argumentative style essay, along with an annotated bibliography of their sources so far. This forced the students to think critically about their sources and to develop a roadmap for their supporting arguments in their Final Essay. This was also a great place for the GSIs to provide feedback on writing quality and style and anticipated direction of the essays. This led to improved and easier to read and grade Final Essays in 2024. I also developed rubrics for the GSIs for each of these assessment stages to make grading easy and consistent across all. The class average for the Final Essay went from 91% to 93.1%, with a tighter distribution (sd from 14.7 to 10.9), from 2023 to 2024. While this shift is not strongly significant (p-value 0.092), it is still a clear increase in performance average.
I still felt one more piece was missing to really help improve student performance on the essay and provide additional feedback. An opportunity in another course where I introduced a peer review component to a similar large assignment became the key idea. So, this spring in teaching this course for my final semester, I implemented a peer review component. As we are still in this term, I do not have the final stats for 2025’s Final Essay performance, however, the anecdotal feedback from the peer review process was overwhelmingly positive. Many students reported that their peers gave them really good feedback, but even more students reported that undergoing the peer review process made them think about their own essays more critically and in a new light and expressed that they felt their own writing benefited after reading others.
Perpetual challenges faced by large biology courses are engagement in the topic and development of higher cognitive skills. I tried to address these in my transformation of this large writing assignment into several pieces with more frequent engagement and even moments of active learning in the annotated bibliography and the peer review. The improved quality of the Final Essays speak for themselves.