Improving Risk Literacy Through Supplemental Instruction

• Activity Number: 330
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 6, 2013 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Risk Analysis
• Author(s): Alexandra Kapatou*+
• Companies: American University
• Keywords: Education ; Supplemental instruction ; SI

Abstract

Supplemental Instruction (SI) is an academic support system designed to increase retention of students in typically difficult classes, such as mathematics and statistics. Unlike other programs, SI is open to all students who feel they need help in that particular course and the help is given by a student leader who has taken the course previously and did well. The student leaders are not teaching assistants, because they are trained by the SI program to present the material in a way complementary to the method the professor uses. In addition to the students who benefit from the support, the student leaders also benefit from this program: the student leaders are usually majoring in the field they support and this experience provides them with training and also helps retain them in the field. In this study, a variation of the SI program is explored with a comparative experiment: the performance of students with SI support is compared to the performance of students without SI support. We believe this method can easily be applied to many educational settings and even be used internationally to improve the education of students all over the world.