A key to fully appreciate art is understanding the creative journey and the underlying creative critical thinking which leads to the “message and meaning” of the piece.
Honors students are given the option of completing an individual or small group creative project to fulfill their honors enrichment plan.
Teaching immunology is very complex. Understanding what white cells do in fighting pathogens (disease organisms) is difficult for students. For several years I had students fill out a white cell table as homework - name of cell, function, and does it move in the body. I tell students to have it ready for the next lecture. I then have students write on a blank table on the board filling in info at the next lecture. I did not any assessment to see if this table worked.
SBU200 – Society and Business is being taught online for the first time this Spring. Case study assignment submissions rarely connect the ‘’solution” for the case problem, with the content (concepts, examples, vocabulary) in the chapter in the textbook or other resources provided at the end of the chapter. Student responses are heavily weighted with opinion, even though a rubric is provided and used to provide consistent feedback.
The SLPA program requires observations of therapy in three of our courses. We have struggled for years with students having difficulty getting observations completed in the field due to many issues (observation site schedules, lack of fingerprint card, work schedules, etc). I also struggled professionally with not knowing the quality of the observations seen and whether they were showing them the skills they need to learn as a future SLPA. During this semester, we implemented the use of the "Master Clinician Network" used by many University Speech and Hearing Programs.
Drawing inspiration from French philospher Marcel Proust, who wrote of the connection between involuntary memories & physical stimuli (e.g. smell), students were given 10 study cards which were color, flavor, & scent-coordinated to facilitate memorization of English principle verb parts (simple, simple past, & past participle forms) in an ESL030 Grammar III course.
Every anthropology class starts with an explanation of anthropology and the fact that there are four main sub-fields in anthropology (i.e. Archaeology, Cultural, Linguistics, Physical.) Each anthropologist specializes in one of these fields. At the beginning of the semester each field is discussed, explained, and students are encouraged to think of examples of each. After understanding the fields, they are asked which of the fields they think they would like best.
In Fall 2014 I re-designed my COM225 Public Speaking course into a 5-week "Fast Track to Completion" format. When I recalled having taught Summer sessions (which are also 5 weeks in duration), I remembered that students had difficulty completing the reading assignments from the established textbook--it was quite lengthy (and expensive). But, I wanted to see if taking the course during the regular semester might make a difference in student engagement with the textbook. Dismal results. Only about 75% of the students were reading and comple
In FALL 2014 EMCC/SAAC conducted its semester assessment in Critical Inquiry, one of seven general education abilities at EMCC. Data was collected from 12 sections with 273 students in 2014, representing a 17% increase over 2011. Classes administrating the assessment included CIS, ECN, MAT, PSY, and SOC. The areas assessed were Observation/Question, Identifying Hypothesis/Explanation, Planning, Analysis, and Conclusion/Solution. Of the 273 students, 33% were new freshman, 30% were freshman/sophomore and 37% were sophomore (down from 52% in 2011).
My BIO 160 students often have difficulty identifying and locating peer reviewed resources for a disease research paper. I have worked with the EMCC librarians to show students databases, citation tools, and a discussion of peer revied versus popular articles. At this time the students used the library website and found two potential resources. To improve this process, Jennifer Wong has created a screencast that shows how to use the library website to locate resources.
The first step to building professional relationships of respect with students is to know and use their name. I have problems remembering the names of some of my students that are in my hybrid classes, since we only meet once per week. The Great Southwest Teaching Conference in October is an annual conferenced for sharing out of good teaching ideas. A colleague I met there confessed to the same dilemma, and shared their solution - a picture of each student at the beginning of the semester!
The goal of these assessments was to engage students in hands on experiments similiar to a science lab. Students always ask why differential equations is so important in STEM fields. So, two labs were done in my differential equations class. One was using thermometers and checking their accuracy (how long does it take for the thermometer to get back to body temperature after drinking cold water, doing jumping jacks, and chewing gum (placebo)). The 2nd one was to verify that a mass spring system follows a 2nd order differential equation.
During Fall 2014, SOC 130 (Human Sexuality) particiapted in the SAAC Critical Inquiry Assessment. I have attached the assignment, the SAAC rubric, and the scores for the course. Students created a research project focusing on five areas (averages in parentheses): 1. question/observation (3.91) 2. hypothesis (3.46) 3. planning (3.18) 4. analysis (3.95) 5. conclusion (3.82). The lowest score was in the planning area which is the development of the survey questions which had to connect to testing their hypothesis.
Students in MAT 182 seem to constantly struggle with the graphing section in the course. I have added days in for practice, given worksheets and still results seem to be lower than I was expecting. This current semester I continued with the practice worksheet that has 10 graphing problems where they are to use a table to help them graph, identify amplitude, phase shift and period, as well as of course graph the function. However, this semester I tried giving them two separate packets where all I did was change the numbers around and change a few numbers in the function.
I utilize several techniques to assist my students with their anxiety and "fear" of math.
The accounting faculty has adopted a new text book for the accounting sequence ACC111-ACC230-ACC240. All content is contained in one text, thus reducing the overall cost to the student. A good deal of the basic content in ACC111 will be repeated in a condensed version in ACC230. In order to determine the retention from ACC111 to ACC230 I am developing a pretest on Canvas to see what basic accounting knowledge will need to be highlighted during the first few lesson modules.
This is an online course with an emphasis on learning the principles of supervisory management in an organizational setting. The method of instruction and level of learning will be measured by the quality of the student’s responses on the Discussion Boards and their application of the principles of management.