Cooperative/Collaborative Learning

Need:  Streamline 1st 4 weeks of Differential Equations.  Create clearer expectations, journal instructions, MATLAB directions, problem sets, and activities.  Alleviate student confusion.  

The Counseling Division wanted to determine the effectiveness of the CPD150 Career Unit which includes a Career Interest Assessment, Career Research, and Career Planning. In effort to measure the Career Units effectiveness on student learning we created a 5 item Pre/Post Assessment that is modeled after the Critical Inquiry Rubric. The Pre Assessment was administered in the beginning of the Fall 2017 semester with 741 responses and the Post Assessment was administered in November of 2017.

This CATS' purpose was to determine if part of an ACC230 exam resulted in a statistically significant difference between an onine course and a F2F course.  In Fall of 2017, I piloted an ACC230 online class.  I wondered if there would be a major grade/score difference on an Inventory Valuation problem using First-In-First-Out (FIFO) and Last-In-First-Out (LIFO) between the two, different, instructional modalities.  I picked this accounting topic because it was used in two prior CATS (candy example).  My hypothesis was that online students would score lower, because learni

Writing lab reports is something all students, even strong writers, struggle with.  It is a different style and format to all most other writing that they have experienced before.

In the 3rd week of PSY 101 students have to complete an assignment critical to college success (locating a research article in an academic journal on a specific topic and providing a summary, APA style reference, & informed opinion).  Recognizing that this task is usually just beyond the students' current abilities, I use extensive scaffolding to support their acquisition of these important skills. Nonetheless, grades on this assignment remain low and approximately 60 % of students are unable to successfully complete the full task.

My students always seem to be intimidated by the word exam. I wanted to see what and why this happens. I gave the students a "practice problem" on graphing functions based on algebra and calculus ideas. They were not allowed to work on it together, however I did not call it an exam. I wanted to see how they did knowing it was not an exam. The students performance on the "practice" was outstanding. There were small errors in the algebra but the overall concept was near perfect. Out of two sections, a total of 53 students, everyone scored 90% or better.

After several years of teaching writing, it is clear that revision is the most important and most difficult part of the writing process.  I have stopped the traditional process of partnering student up, trading papers, and having them make random corrections.  Now, we correct papers as a class, we have substantive discussions about decisions in writing, and my students are actually learning how to be better writers.  I have used this in my ENG101 and ENG102 courses at EMCC, but this can easily be used in any course that incorporates writing.  I think this would be extrem

A learning objective for Com 230HC is for students “identify, read, synthesize, and discuss information from a current scholarly, peer reviewed journal article.” Three topics being in Communication, and one topic of choice, in their area of interest.

Statistics elicit overall student angst, which affects grades, attitude, attrition and learning. Although students attended tutoring, were allowed to re-do homework and engaged in interactive classroom experiences, PSY 230 course retention rate remained at 25%. I used a different pedagogical technique this semester - Mastery Learning - which was used successfully in K-12 grades. Rather than a traditional letter grade or percentage on assignments, students received "not yet" grades and instructor feedback. Resubmissions were accepted as many times as necessary to reach mastery.

For the last 2 years, I have been using a question of the day to start my classes as part of a cooperative learning strategy learned from taking the Johnson & Johnson Cooperative Learning workshop.  After doing this for a a year, I wanted to get feedback from students, so I included items about the questions of the day (along with other cooperative activities) on my end of course evaluation.

At the end of the semester, students in BIO160 take a cumulative lab practical.  A practical exam is set up in stations, the students physically move from station to station and has a “set up” from a lab.  There are 2-3 questions for each station; the exam is timed.  The first semester giving the practical, the scores were very low.  In an attempt to improve the scores, I gave the students a review and the grades improved slightly.  This has been the routine for a few semesters.  At the end Fall16, I tried a practice practical.  After an informal survey, I

A prerequisite to physics is MAT182.  Students need to know law of sine/cosine, and vector concepts from trig to be successful in physics.  In the past, I would spend a lot of time classify triangles (SSS, ASA, etc) to help students know which "law" to use, and this was done at the end of the semester.  I did not spend time using law of sine/cosine with vector applications .  Students typically scored a low B on law of sine/cosine problems.   In F17, I taught the "laws" and incorporated vectors in week 4 to show students real life applications.

Participants registered and attended the face-to-face workshop that was presented using Canvas. Individuals registered for the course using a provided link. Participants completed a pre-assessment to measure their understanding of utilizing Canvas outside of the classroom according to the learning objectives. After the pre-assessment the workshop included topics on the purposes of using a LMS (according to eLearning Industry), connecting benefits of a LMS to out-of-class activities, and discussing how EMCC can move forward with these ideas in mind.

Every semester, students perfrom poorly on the final exam for calculus I (MAT22X); the average is typically a D/F.  Students are given an indepth review guide of all topics in the course along with the answer key that includes detailed steps on how to do each problem.  I often make changes to my pedagogy, handouts, activities, exams, homework, and other assessments every semester. In Spring 17, two main things changed in my MAT221 course.  

We specifically investigated how we can integrate creativity more effectively in the classroom for the benefit of both students and faculty. Our investigation included: reading Creative Confidence, learning more about Design Thinking challenges, locating and sharing creativity resources, using creativity to personally address one teaching challenge, and implementing at least one actitivty/lesson/strategy that we deveop using creativity to at least one class this semester.