Common Assignment/Final

The economics faculty at EMCC collaboratively assessed our students' quantitative reasoning abilities in fall 2015, aligned with EMCC’s Quantitative Reasoning rubric. The assessment required students to place themselves in the hypothetical role of a leader of a task force appointment by the new President of the United States to recommend a strategy for eliminating the US Budget deficit within a year To complete this successfully, students needed to address all areas of the quantitative reasoning rubric.

I wanted to find the most beneficial method for students to understand their writing revisions. 

Based on their learning styles tendencies, I compared the their VAK Learning Styles Self-Assessment Questionnaire (Swinburne University of Technology) results with their method of submission (online or in-person) to the Writing Center. 

Every semester my students start class (both face to face and online) with the Getting Started Module.  One of the assignments is the "Meet Your Class" assignment.  This assignment is standard in Canvas and requires that students embed a picture into their discussion post.  Embedding a picture in Canvas is not the simple cut and paste or upload that the students are used to.  When I first started using this assignment (Spring  2013) the average score on this assignment was 16.44/20 due to an unsuccefully embedded photo.

In Fall 2015, of my Introduction to Psychology classes, I had an honors class required to do a research project. As such, I decided to have my honors class students research, design, run and analyze their own projects (for examples of their projects, feel free to email me!).

At the end of the semester I gave a common final to all of my introductory courses. To explore if actively doing research methods helps learning, I pulled questions from the final having to do with research methods and analyzed performance on those particular questions compared to the test as a whole.

For the Career Research Paper, students had to submit their rough drafts to the Writing Center.  Some students waited to submit to the Writing Center. As a result, 30% of students did not submit edited rough drafts with Writing Center documentation.  

Narrated instructional and demonstration videos were develped for online class CIS121AI - Macintosh Operating System. This CATS will make observations regarding the effectiveness of this apporach during the pilot semester of the online course and determine what improvements, if any, are necessary.

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.

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.

This fall I compared (Like Becky Baranowski had done for Calc 2) students coming from the PHY 121 traditional class versus those in PHY121/MAT221 Learning community on the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism. While the numbers are small (n=12 from LC and n=10 from traditional) it was interesting to compare. Both groups had essentially the same pretest score (LC 18.2% and Trad 18.3%) but differed on the post test (LC 67% and trad 52%). Since the numbers are small I will be adding the students from this spring semester to try and get more statistically reliable numbers

Since Spring 2013, I have required students to submit their drafts to the Online writng center for feedback.  Over the past several semesters, I have seen their average scores go from 43 out of 60 on increase to 52 out of 60 on the short essay and from 62 out of 80 on the long essay to 70 out of 80 on the long essay.  I have made some revisions using submission links to canvas and hope to close the loop at the end of the semester for RDG 095, RDG 091, CRE 101 and RDG 081.

This semester I have developed a common lab final for the BIO 160 sections offered here at EMCC. This common final will incorporate laboratory activities performed during the semester and is a cumulative final. The common lab final should serve to support similar curriculum across across all sections offered here at EMCC. 

Results from this final will help me identify lab activies that need refinement as well as commonly misunderstood concepts from the class.

In summer 2014, the calculus III workbook was updated to incorporate more physics with the calculus curriculum.  In fall 2014, students are using this new workbook.  Of the 31 students in the class, 7 of them took the calculus/physics learning community in fall 2013.  All but 2 of the remaining 24 students have had (or are currently in) PHY121/PHY131. 

Challenge: Create a menu driven script that aids in adminisdtering a Linux network or server.

Science faculty are constantly hearing from their students, "This isn't math! I didn't learn this in my math class". Many students are not able to transfer what they learned in math into their science courses.  Most of the concepts in MAT091 are crucial to success in science.  Throughout the semester, I met with 6 science faculty to discuss HOW students see these topics in science classes.

Each semester all ECN instructor at EMCC administer the ECN common final exam, a multiple choice test based on our courses learning outcomes, in addition to a course-specific final.  Instructors collect the frequency distribution of student responses, and results are aggregated to look for discipline-wide strenghts and weaknesses.  We then create Learning Outcomes Improvement Plans (LOIPs) to identify ways to changes in pedagogy/curriculum to address weaker areas.