Update (1 week after CATS was originally submitted): After submitting this CATS, students began learning about Power Series (which is one reason to learn Convergence/Divergence of series discussed in this CATS). WIth the scaffolding handout, they were able to come up with how to deteremine convergence/divergence of Power Series on their own! Again, I typically have to do a lot more lecture, but I didn't.
Peer Lead Focus and Learning Review
Monitoring student engagement and learning during class & providing feedback is tough due to lack of time. One way to do this is Peer lead learning review; it monitors engagement and provides feedback.
The class was divided into six groups of four students; one student acted as a peer leader. The peer leaders were rotated after 3 weeks, allowing each group member to act as a peer leader.
The purpose of this qualitative study was to evaluate an environment to determine whether or not it encourages interaction among tutors and faculty. Prior to the intervention in Spring 2020, tutor and faculty interaction was low during pre-semester meet-and-greet sessions; the sessions were conducted in a panel format with tutors comprising the audience. The Spring 2020 session, however, was held in a small-group format, and informal feedback was positive. Formal tutor survey results showed that the small groups enabled more flow of conversation as well as deeper connection.
I teach MGT101 online and most of the assignments are discussions and essays.I would like to explore more ways of online engagement using the Groups feature in Canvas. Discussions work fine, but I notice it can be challenging to encourage students to respond in a non-forced, non-mechanical way. Last semester, I used a group assignment from the course master. The assignment required students to read a case study, and as a team, respond to the written assignment as a discussion within their group. Groups gave students control of the assignment in their learning workspace.
Knowledge retention and transfer are at the core of what we do. It is evident that all students learn in different ways. However, if students are asked to DO something in the process of learning they will not only retain the information but rather be able to comprehend how it is applied to the real world. In addition, as the students start to report out to the class the instructor can listen to the responses and clarify or demonstrate the material to ensure long term retention success. For more information not included in this write up, please attachments.
Please note: From speaking with faculty in the prerequisite coureses, they are incorporating reviews of rules of exponents and fractions. But, at what detail and how, I am unsure. Hopefully with the creation of SLOs and having Guided Pathways, we can come up with some activities and best practices as a group to help students understand these two concepts better. I am not happy with the idea of just accepting that students will not be able to integrate a fractional problem that requires rules of exponents. There has to be something out there to help our students
Applying course content to real world experience so students understand why they are learning an applicable skill. Although using desktop publishing programs such as Adobe InDesign is a critical skill expected in many graphic design occupations, few students understand what desktop publishing is or how important it is. I wanted my EMCC students to experience the "scratch and sniff" effects of producing and publishing print products. So, when I first taught Adobe InDesign in Fall 2016, I arranged for my students to create print products for the Career and Transfer Center.
College Success Week events aim to connect students with members of the College Community to build connections vital to their success. Roary’s Amazing Race was developed this year as a way to re-envision how information about campus resources is provided to students more effectively for campus resource staff and more engaging for students. As students traveled the pathway to earning their free t-shirt, they were given information by each pit stop on upcoming campus events that may interest them (i.e. upcoming shows at the PAC).
Program review is a mission-critical strategic planning process and is one critical element of accreditation. In past years, some departments chose not to complete a program review, while others only did the bare minimum. Some did stellar work. Part of the completion problem was length, along with question redundency, and a lack of accountability for its completion. This year the program review process was redesigned to foster collaboration and accountability between writers and reviewers (Deans/VPs) and to reinforce the application of strategic data for the program.
College Success Week, held during the fall, is designed to expose students to the many resources available to help them complete their educational goals. EMCC students* indicate they are either unaware or do not take advantage until it’s too late to maximize them as a resource. In an effort to expose students early, one of the activities offered during CSW was the College Success Pyramid Game. The game was designed to increase awareness of resources in a fun, engaging and meaningful way. It was structured similar to the $100,000 Pyramid Game.
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.
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).