Biology Tuition Course

Before students can excel at a subject, it is vital that they learn to enjoy the subject first. We utilise real life examples to help students link the concepts to situations that they can relate to, making understanding and memorisation much easier. 

Biology lessons at Catalyst will emphasise heavily on the understanding of crucial concepts in the syllabus, with significant attention towards using crucial keywords and phrases. This ensures that you will be able to study efficiently and achieve your desired grade. 

We also place a huge emphasis on the practise and mastery of certain question types/concepts which always come out in exams. This ensures that you would have already “secured” some marks before the exam itself!

Throughout our various batches of students, the majority of students who took Biology attained an average of A2. In addition, most of our students showed improvement of at least 3 grades (e.g C5 to A2). The sooner the students join our classes, the more confident we are in improving their grades.

Over the past 5 years, 91% of our students achieved an A or a B in their O/A Levels or end of year examination. 

There are benefits to both home tuition and group tuition. 1 to 1 home tuition may help you to improve in terms of content knowledge, but the extent to which it can do so is limited. 

Our group classes have been shown to improve content retention and the student's enjoyment of the subject. A few factors contribute to this:

1. Students can associate memories of concepts to a dynamic environment with their classmates, compared to having a static home tuition context for all the lessons.
2. The various paces, questions, and backgrounds of the other students in the class will motivate the student to keep pace and broaden their mindsets. 
3. Enjoying the class leads to an association of positive emotions with the subject, leading to appreciation of the subject and motivation to excel in it. 

Our past students have commented that our group size is optimal, helping them to focus during lessons and also providing motivation from their peers. 

Our tutors are all experienced and qualified in teaching the subject matter, and are eager to share their knowledge. More importantly, they are all trained in helping our students understand and apply exam answering techniques, which is usually not a focus of other centres.

Our lessons are vibrant and engaging, where tutors as well as students are encouraged to help one another. We foster a “no dumb questions” environment where no one is afraid to ask about anything, and if needed, complimentary consultations are also provided by our friendly tutors.

Each class will have a maximum of 6 students. 

At Catalyst, lessons generally start with 1 to 1 sessions to bridge your fundamentals, before placing the student in a small group of like-minded students to learn at a similar pace. 

Our tutors are all MOE-trained and equipped with the necessary syllabus knowledge. Our Biology tutors are well trained and very qualified, holding at least Degree or Masters in science-related fields.

Our curriculum dedicates some time & attention for our tutors to cover practical answering techniques as well as basic hands on experiment and apparatus handling.

We do not currently have lab classes, though we are in the process of obtaining the relevant licences. However, we believe that the paper 3’s percentage of 15% is really important too. As such, some of our weekly lessons will be focused on how to answer practical questions and we also include lessons on fundamental apparatus handling as well.

Our curriculum follows the MOE syllabus and will strongly resemble that of most, if not all, of the schools in Singapore. If your school includes an additional topic, our knowledgeable tutors will be more than happy to assist in going through that topic at a separate time.

Biology is seen as a subject which requires a lot of memorising, which is somewhat true. At Catalyst, we teach our students to memorise efficiently by memorising certain keywords or key phrases instead of just blindly memorising the whole paragraph. That makes things much easier for them as they will be able to study smarter, not harder!

Furthermore, Biology learning requires a lot of visual aids for optimal understanding. We utilise a series of methods for easier understanding such as videos specifically curated to accelerate the understanding of Biology concepts in our students. 

Through a combination of conceptual understanding and effective study methods, our students are well equipped with the optimal techniques to handle this subject.

In addition, our tutors conduct 1-to-1 sessions first to identify any gaps in your learning and determine an optimal starting point for lessons. We tailor our teaching pace to suit the individual student's needs. Our tutors are all trained with the latest syllabus and our proven teaching methodology to provide you with the edge to do well in exams.

Additional consultations at no extra charge are provided for all our students. This is to help students who need specific help for certain topics.