Practice

This CATs explores the use of a game-based learning activity, modeled after Taboo©, to boost student engagement, communication skills, and conceptual understanding across disciplines. Students worked in pairs to describe and guess course-specific terms without using certain "taboo" words, reinforcing complex concepts while improving verbal and listening abilities. Mixed-methods assessments revealed increased engagement, deeper understanding, and enhanced skills critical for STEM, healthcare, humanities, and social sciences.

Traditional classroom level assessments does not always perform the way instructors intend it to, as it is highly subjective and internalize instructor biases. Traditional grading systems pit students and instructors against each other by making grades a commodity that students must negotiate with the instructor, instead of building trusting relationships that allow for students to learn from their mistakes, take risks, and be creative.

Students teach peers how to schedule Spanish tutoring sessions to practice conversation via Cranium and Brainfuse.

Café Mariposa is an open pedagogy and experiential learning project. Students engage with the content and the campus community in a relaxed atmosphere where they can build Spanish vocabulary, and hone listening and interpersonal communication skills.

BIO 201, Human Anatomy & Physiology (A&P I), is a gateway course. Students learn about body structure (Anatomy) and function (Physiology) for the first time, covering enormous information. The human body is dynamic; when confronted with changes in its internal or external environments, the body systems collaborate (they don’t work in isolation) to keep its internal environment within stable working limits to maintain life.

As evidenced in multiple CATS written about journaling in STEM, faculty from chemistry, physics, calculus, and biology utilize journals to improve students' deeper level of learning.  Critical thinking skills and written communication skills (EMCC ILOs) are important in STEM. I want to ensure my students leave my own course ready and prepared for the other STEM courses.  Also, these journals are used to asses physics' classroom learning outcomes.  Please see attached documents for sample survey results and journal entries. 

This assessment assesses the CLO of "Students will pick the most appropriate tool/technique to solving a problem" as well as the ILO of written communication. 

Anatomy & Physiology is the foundational subject ; students learn about human body systems' structure and function. Structure and function complement each other if the structure changes it will affect the function and vise versa. The deeper understanding of the subject will help students understand the change and make connections among body systems; this is central to understand and treat the diseases. Case studies assignments help students link content knowledge to clinical application.

In Fall 20, math courses transitioned to a Live Online format versus traditional online. Faculty spent the summer frantically learning technologies and strategies through workshops, brainstorming sessions, and social media. Math faculty also trained one another on Zoom/Webex, NearPod, and Whiteboard.fi with a common goal -  to learn and implement new tools in the virtual environment to keep students engaged; increasing student success and persistence.

As a Communications instructor I stress the importance of public speaking skills in many of my courses.  To aid students in optimizing their speech presentations, I include class time for small group rehearsal.  After a dozen semesters teaching communications I have observed that many students do not engage in the rehearsal activity or they use the dedicated time ineffectively.  To optimize the process and motivate students to practice their speeches, I changed the lesson plan in two ways: 1) conduct more than one rehearsal activity for shorter periods of time and 2) break do

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Through conversations with the tutors, a desire was discovered to be better.  The tutors know their material very well but wanted to see if there was a way to improve on their delivery style and customer service.  I introduced the concept of continuous quality improvement (CQI) which is a culture of never-ending improvement.  The assumption is that unless we learn something about what we are doing, we are unlikely to know how to improve it.

Students struggle with mastering concepts in microbiology. Journaling is a method that is documented to help students learn science courses. We implemented journaling recently and wanted to see if there is any significant impact after 3 semesters of collecting data.

Spoiler alert - nope, at least with the way we are implementing journaling currently. We are regrouping and will restructure the directions to hopefully guide students to be more successful in their journaling.