November 2017

EMCC's Honors Department designed the first Exposition Fair to allow all students to showcase their work in different formats including roundtables for students to discuss their work in progress, poster displays, oral presentations and interactive displays.  David Weaver was our keynote speaker and responses from participant surveys evaluating the Exposition Fair were overwhelmingly positive!  Almost two-thirds of survey participants (N=90) reported that they did not know about the Makerspace and strongly agreed that they liked the interactive nature of the fair as well as the var

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.

There were some incidents on campus last semester where students were not comfortable taking care of their personal space. We have found that students do not feel empowered to make decisions and share their thoughts. In order to be successful in life, students need the tools to be able to express themselves confidently, even if they are uncomfortable due to pressure and concerns of rejection. At times, social categories impact how much personal power we have and how we use it. This includes, gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, religion, etc.

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.

After completing midterm evaluations, students expressed a desire to have less lecture and more activities. Therefore, I designed and implemented a CATS to assess different approaches to learning in my COM 100 courses (5 sections) over a two-week experimental period. I compared a traditional lecture based approach (control group – 1 section), balanced lecture and interactive learning approach (experimental group 2 sections), and completely interactive learning approach with no lecture (experimental group 2 sections).

At the beginning of every HHM event we have a kickoff and collect student surveys for IIE funding. Last year we were concerned because we only received 20 surveys even though we served food for 100+ people. We wanted to have more surveys so we implemented some logistical changes in the kickoff day, this was a.

-We had someone assigned permanently at the survey table. 

- Explained to students the importance of completing the survey.

- Every table/activity encouraged to complete a survey at the end.