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.
I had being noticing for years that a majority of students in every semester does not score in there exams as expected and hence I planned to keep aside the last 3 days at the end of the last semester as follows.
Dec/02/2013 - Exam Review, Dec/04/2013 - MOCK EXAM*, Dec/06/2013 - Review again with regard to the Mock Exam Results and compared it with The Final Exam on Dec/11/2013 and Dec/09/2013 respectively.
the following were the results.
Objective: To help students understand the process of determining filing status' for tax payer clients in various given scenarios. Students struggled to determine filing status and the number of exemptions clients may claim.
This assignment is for the online version of STO/HUM292 that has not been launched yet.
This is a performance-based class, so students are required to perform a story for their final exam. Students will record themsevles and then upload for grading. There is a set rubric students are to follow in order to demonstrate effective storytelling techniques and best practices.
I have just finished my first teaching class of MAT082 at EMCC. It was a nice experience for me. But there is one thing I felt like proposing to the structure of the course. I think there should be a midterm at the middle of the semester that covers half the syllabus (at least) and the exam format should be the same as finals. There are couple of positives in this :
1. Students will be introduced with the exam format
2. If the load of chapters are being reduced by half in the final then the students will have better chance to do good in it.
This CATS is to discuss the difference between the final grade results on my traditional calculus I class vs. the one in a learning community with PHY121.
Many people do learning communities (see MAT and CPD LC's) to try improve retention in classes. However, the LC between PHY 121 and MAT 221 has been about trying to improve student understanding of the concepts of physics and calculus and how they fit together. Retention and success in these coures have been fine which is reason for focus on understanding rather than retention. From the attached file it can be seen that on the Force Concept Inventory the LC students did better than traditional class even though they had less math preparation for the course.
Objective: To assist students better understand the process of determining filing status' for tax payer clients in various given scenarios. Students seem to struggle determining filing status and the number of personal exemptions clients may claim.
The purpose of this assessment is to allow students to use their own personal experience to bring the concept to a situation in which they can relate. It’s my theory that If they can relate themselves to the concept, they can better understand how to make the decisions for others.
The students in my introductory Illustrator class often struggle with basic design elements when they work on their projects, such as the overall composition, negative space, color spaces and the placement of text. The 3-part poster project gave them the opportunity to not only explore their creative talents but also think of a meaningful design output that conveys a strong and clear message to the audience, using all the technical skills they learned in the course of the semester:
EMCC's ECN faculty have developed and implemented the common ECN212 (Microeconomic Principles) final exam by first defining our discipline-wide Learning Objectives (LO) and then created multiple choice questions for the common final portion across all sections. Instructors recorded each students' response for each question in an excel spreadsheet and sent to me, who aggregated and analyzed the results. Overall results were good with 2 more LOs scoring above 80% and 2 fewer scoring below 60%.
In order to compare the performance of those students who had placed directly into ENG101 (placers) with students who had completed ENG091 in order to get into ENG101 (completers), we completed an ENG101 common assignment and assessed an equal number of each group. We used most of the EMCC Writing Rubric (Focus, Support, Organization, Language Use, and Mechanics--scale of 1 - 4.) All nine residential ENG faculty took part in the assessment on January 7, 2013 -- we particiapted in norming and then scored papers.
EMCC's ECN faculty have developed and implemented the common ECN211 (Macroeconomic Principles) final exam by first defining our discipline-wide Learning Objectives (LO) and then created multiple choice questions for the common final portion across all sections. Instructors recorded each students' response for each question in an excel spreadsheet and sent to me, who aggregated and analyzed the results (See attached). Overall results showed slight improvements in 4 LOs but 2 were worse than the previous semester.
Since Spring 2010, a common assignment has been incorporated into Sociology 101 (Introduction to Sociology). A group of faculty worked on the assignment and rubric with the SAAC co-chairs during Fall 2009. The assignment has been implemented at the end of each semester in the SOC 101 courses (learning outcomes, assignment, and rubric attached below). I have attached some of the comments and results from the instructors from each of the semesters (when information was provided).
The Social, Civic, Global Responsibility Common Assignment was implemented in SOC 130 (Human Sexuality). Students were given the topic of the AIDS epidemic as their focus for this assignment. The rubric was given at the same time as the assignment. Both were discussed and reviewed in class. The focus of the assignment tied in with the rest of the semester as the students organized the EMCC AIDS team, raised money for AIDS awareness, and created slides to be shown outside during the AIDS Day event. The average scores were as follows:
Question 1: 2.67(of 3)