March 2017

Since Fall 2014 , the calculus instructors have been working on creating common questions to have on the final exam for calculus I.  Faculty (both full and part time) meet to discuss pedagogy, common questions and creation of a pre-post test.  The common questions are the first half of our final exam with the 2nd half written by each individual faculty member.  Each semester, the questions are looked over and kept or modified.  The purpose of the common questions is to make sure all calculus faculty are covering "core" topics in MAT22X.

In Fall 2016 SAAC conducted its assessment in Communication, one of 7 general education abilities at EMCC. Data was collected from 57 sections with 1303 students in 2016, compared to 32 sections and 512 students in 2013. The areas assessed in Comm were Physical Delivery (Eye Contact, Facial Expressions, Gestures, Posture, Movement, Audio/Visuals and Preparation) and Vocal Delivery (Language, Pace, Pitch, Articulation, and Pronounciation). See attached Ppt.  Results showed the strongest area to be Vocal Delivery, with an average score of 3.16 out of 4.

The Feminist Club's focus for Women's History Month has been Intersectionality and Feminism. Club members tabled outside with posters on intersectionality in order to educate employees and students on its importance.  95% of those who attended the table did not know about intersectionality. After club members discussed the topic with attendees and shared their informational posters, attendees were encouraged to create a poster on intersectionality. The posters were placed on a clothesline for sharing.

In our first run of the PHY131/MAT231 learning community (LC) in Fall 16, we tried a format of seting up a physics problem on an exam, and then use the resulting integral to be solved on the math portion of the exam. We would like to do this for each of the 5 exams in Fall 17. This would allow/require us to focus on intgrals from day one and reorder material in both classes. Some reordering was done in Fall 16, but after our first time around, we realize that more needs to be changed.

Classrooms are filled with students that show up but never participate, and that is distressing.  Educators know the real world does not operate in a singularity.  Contextually, singularity means success in achieved through collaborative efforts working in teams.  Your team may be geographically diverse, or sitting next to you.  Proximity is not important, sharing ideas and the ability to express thereof is important.

Need: While EDU students all do Field Experiences anywhere from 10 – 30 hours, sometimes their experiences don’t directly correlate to the competencies of the course they are taking.