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Enhancing student retention of prerequisite knowledge through pre‐class activities and in‐class reinforcement

To foster the connection between biochemistry and the supporting prerequisite concepts, a collection of activities that explicitly link general and organic chemistry concepts to biochemistry ideas was written and either assigned as pre‐class work or as recitation activities. We assessed student learning gains after using these activities alone, or in combination with regularly‐integrated clicker and discussion questions. Learning gains were determined from student performance on pre‐ and post‐tests covering key prerequisite concepts, biochemistry course exams, and student self‐evaluation. Long‐term retention of the material was assessed using a comprehensive exam given to a subset of the students. Our results show that using the pre‐class exercises in combination with integrative questions was effective at improving student performance in both the short and long term. Similar results were obtained at both a large research institution with large class enrollments and at a private liberal arts college with moderate enrollments. © 2016 by The International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 45(2):97–104, 2017.