In fall 2013, Dwain Desbien and I taught MAT221/PHY121 learning community (LC). In spring 2014, 8 of these students went on to take MAT230 with me (calculus II). Here is some info on the LC students as compared to the non LC students.
A question on my BIO156/181 Unit 5 exam addresses Mendelian genetics and the inheritance of a trait from parents. The trait in question is inherited in a simple Mendelian manner (one gene with two alleles, one allele being dominant and the other allele being recessive.) Originally the question was about hitchhiker's thumb and involved a kind of "double negative" statement, where "lack of the thumb" was dominant. I think this wording was making it hard for students to think through the problem.
Nursing students (those enrolled in BIO156) and STEM majors (those enrolled in BIO181) are often underprepared when it comes to math skills. In BIO156/181 one of the places where this becomes evident is with conversion of measurements between units (e.g. milimeters to micrometers etc...). We cover the metric system in one lab, take one quiz the following week and then move on. Many students score badly on the quiz, and never really learn from it or improve.
During the past few years of teaching trig, I have always had students struggle significantly with the trig identity chapter. Every semester I try to tweak the way I teach the material and the practice the students receive but I still have students that just don't grasp the material. Fall 2013 I decided to try extending my lecture days by one class and moving the exam. In doing this I was hoping that more time would lead to better success. It still did not make a significant difference. Thus, this semester I decided to make even bigger changes.
There are many ways to assess student learning. Traditionally, I create my own tests however, for one assessment in an English 101, I decided to try something different. As an assignment on Essay writing key terms, the students constructed their own test and an answer sheet. Of course, I did not relinquish the reins entirely to the student.
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.
Since August 2009, I have had students come and see me (as division chair) to ask about retaking the placement exam to get into a higher course. During these last 5 years, I have always had the students go to the math videos created by math faculty on the EMCC placement website. I also told these students to go to www.khanacademy.org and use this free online resource to assist them. In every case, students placed higher on the placement exam (unfortunately, I did not keep a tally for the number of students this impacted).
A new supplement for the microbiology text called Mastering Microbiology was recently released by the publisher. I had heard positive things about the Mastering Biology for BIO 181 (pre-req for micro) and decided to implement Mastering Micro in a like manner. For two semesters prior to utilizing Mastering, the average grade overall at the end of the semesters was 74.64% (n=73).Not a bad average but many students indicated they wanted practice and micro is very conceptual. I was not sure exactly what I wanted to see with my students other than overall increase in performance.
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.
For many years now, math instructors have made the claim that a students' prior knowledge in algebra impacts their success in calculus. If a student struggles with their algebraic skills, can they still pass calculus? To test this hypothesis, I ran data for 188 students which spans from Fall 2005 to Fall 2013 comparing students' 1st exam scores (review exam of algebra) to their final grade in the course.
In Fall 2013, I taught two calculus courses. One of them is linked with Physics (a learning community) and another one is in the traditional format. In the traditional format, calculus is a prerequisite for PHY121. With the learning community, students are able to take both MAT220 and PHY121 in the same semester. The learning community students have the advantage of seeing the applications of calculus in the same semester while the traditional students will see the applications a semester later.
5 -7 minutes
Maria Cecilia Rosales
I use what I call Dictation- Reflection to assess gramatical concepts, listening comprehension and writing skills.
I dictate ten conjugated verb forms from the active vocabulary list for the chapter in question (bailamos, trabajan, etc). Students are asked to:
1- Write down the conjugated verb form I dictate (bailamos)
2- Identify the infinitive form of that verb (bailar)
I administered a four question Pre-Post test in Spring 2012, Fall 2012 and Spring 2013. The Pre-Post test is attached for your reference. In Sp12 and Fa12, students showed great improvement from Pre to Post test, however in Sp13, the percentage improvement from pre to post test dropped drastically. Overall scores on the post test for 2012 were very high (see attached) and for Sp13 were low. There were two main differences from last fall to this spring that contributed to the lower Pre-Post test results.