At my undergrad we called them tutorials. You worked on your assignments and the grad student we go over the questions, answer any questions you may have, and recap the lecture. Later as an Econ grad student they were called labs at my university…I got an assistantship for doing a some sessions each week.

Recitation sections only exist in schools that have graduate programs. The reason for the existence of recitation sections is to offload all of the teaching other than the lecturing (e.g., the answering questions, reviewing assignments, and the grading) onto a graduate student to free up the professor to do research, to help train the graduate student to become a teacher themselves, and to more efficiently teach large numbers of students without hiring more tenured or tenure-track professors. If a professor is running the recitation section, the recitation section accomplishes none of that. They just do it all of that during normal class time.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How baby students attend this school? Usually it is universities with large lectures that have these smaller breakout sessions.

Not just big schools, many classes are divided into seminar days and lecture days even if it’s the same small group for both.

Never heard of it. I went to a college with around 4,000 undergrads and all of the classes were small enough to involve discussion. The professor would lecture and sometimes we had discussions and sometimes not.

Anonymous wrote:Thank you from OP. I attended a small liberal arts college where every class was taught by a professor and there were no large lectures, so this term and concept were unknown to me.

Ask for a refund.

It's a discussion section taught by the TA who goes over the materials from lectures and takes any questions from the students, as well as oversees any assignments. The TA is actually going to be giving out the grades (although technically overseen by the professor and using the professor's rubric generally), so it's not just an office hour-style help period. It's probably more important than attending the lecture itself.

Anonymous wrote:How baby students attend this school? Usually it is universities with large lectures that have these smaller breakout sessions.

Not just big schools, many classes are divided into seminar days and lecture days even if it’s the same small group for both.

Lol. I meant “many“

How baby students attend this school? Usually it is universities with large lectures that have these smaller breakout sessions.

Even my small classes had undergrad TAs running recitation/sections.

We called it section. It might not feel mandatory, but showing up and participating in section is one of the best ways to improve grades or keep good grades up! Don’t skip section!

Thank you from OP. I attended a small liberal arts college where every class was taught by a professor and there were no large lectures, so this term and concept were unknown to me.

It's what we used to call a discussion section. A subsection of the class meets with a T.A. to go over the material from the lecture.

It's a far cry from the original French meaning (literally, standing up to recite a poem by memory, still a traditional way of making K-12 kids learn stuff in France)... but it means a small group discussion.

My kid is at a medium sized private & has this too. He has it for a class which has around 60 students enrolled. This is speculation, but I think it is a breakout session in a smaller group to review concepts covered in the class. I'm guessing it's run by a graduate student. When I was a graduate student, we had a similar setup with some of us getting assistantships for working with smaller sections of large intro courses.

My older child is entering college - a medium sized private college. His classes are intro to statistics, intro to economics, calculus and spanish. Several of them have a “recitation” in addition to the class time. What is a recitation? The college has given no explanation of this in advance. Thank you.