Check for Understanding

For the on-line (SPA 117) course, students are required to submit a video recording of a role-playing situation for each of the course modules.  In the video recording students use the target language in order to complete meaningful tasks they will counter in the real world as health care professionals.  These task based role playing activities will assess verbal and nonverbal communication skills, mostly the students’ grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary, and speaking capacities learned in each module.

This assessment is designed to review students final projects that they will construct during their e-commerce course. This project involves creating a simple storefront with a simple shopping cart as well as methods for utilizing social media to market the products.

ACC111, Accounting Principles I was new to the online format in the Spring of 2017.  This assessment measured student academic performance of those in the online course versus their counterparts in the face-to-face course of the following semester (I did not teach a F2F, 16-week session of this course in S2017).  Scores of the final course grades were compared to notate any difference in academic achievement/mastery.  

Results:

ONLINE, 16-Week, SP2017 - the class average of the final score was 82.68%

As effective teachers, we must recognize that students are gifted with a variety of intelligences.  In fact, Dr. Howard Gardner has identified eight distinct intelligences.  Unfortunately, all too often we structure our formal assessments to allow for students to utilize very few of these intelligences in assessing student learning.  The following experiment will allow for the comparison of multiple forms of intelligence in formative assessment. 

Trying to visualize molecular processes for students can be very challenging.  Neil Raymond and I decided to try 3-D printed objects to use in the classroom to teach these concepts in Biology.  I used the database thingiverse to search for models, and Neil designed and printed his own working sarcomere through tinkercad.  After using the models in class, I discovered that they can be powerful tools to aid in conceptualizing and visualizing processes, especially at the molecular level.  The 3-D printing is a compliment to STEM curriculum and promotes problem solving skill

The SLPA program is somewhat unique given we are teaching clinical courses in an online format.  It can be difficult to demonstrate disorders and treatment without hands-on learning opportunities.  In order to address the need for examples of disorders and interventions to students, we have included a variety of videos and recorded lectures.  One of the speech sounds I cover in my SLP 214 course is the /r/.  The /r/ sound is one of the most common speech errors children see speech therapists for.

A straight lecture on cell structures is torture for students. To remedy this, I designed a system of flashcards where each organelle is represented by 3 types of cards: a picture card, a structure card, and a characteristic card. Cards have alignment hints for the other two cards. Each group of 4 students is given one set of 36 cards. They work together to align the 3 cards for each organelle.  While groups are engaged in collaborative work to tease out details about each organelle, I can work more closely with each student as they learn to critically evaluate card content.

Instructors are tasked with having to prepare EMT students for work in pre-hospital, in-hospital and now more recently, mobile integrated healthcare settings.  The use of simulation in the classroom helps prepare students for the workplace by exposing them to a broad variety of situations they may encounter by allowing them to apply knowledge and skills without endangering a live patient.  During the simulation the students are placed in an environment set to a standardized patient scenario with a variety of sensory distractors such as props, smells, patient actors with moulage (m

The problem:  Some students have been misinterpreting my instructions for class assignments with multiple steps.  With two multiple stepped assignments, on average 6 out of 31 students missed a concept. 

The process:  Peer groups consisted of 4 students.  After groups were given instructions for the assignment, peers repeated the instructions to their group. Afterwards, each group (8 tables) had to summarize and rewrite the instructions on a mini white board. 

*Not being one to explicitly tell students to place their electronic devices away, I wanted to see if I could not only do that (that is, have them put them away) but also assess their basal understanding of communication concepts within COM 225, public speaking.  

The EMT program was experiencing an issue with students not coming to class prepared and they were not completing their reading assignments prior to coming to class. Instructors noticed that students were not as engaged and lacked the ability to create an open dialogue during classroom discussions.

Two of my hybrid EDU classes this semester were challenging me to actively engage my students, especially when involved in group tasks or assignments. Collaborative groups expert Spencer Kagan recommends, among a variety of strategies, the use of Talking Tokens. Each student is given 3 tokens (I use paper clips from a box in the middle of each table). As they talk, ask a question, give a suggestion, etc., they put a token back in the box. When they are out of tokens, they cannot talk until everyone else in their group is also out. Then, the process begins again.

As I pilot the the Online version of ASB 214, I want to see how much taking this class improves the students' General Education Abilities of Critical Inquiry and Information Literacy, as these are the two skills I have noticed many students are lacking when they first enroll for the face-to-face version of the class. I will assess the students by assigning them a self-evaluation assignment for both of these skills, both at the beginning and the end of the course, to measure how much they feel they have improved.

While attending the League for Innovation Learning Summit, I was struck by a keynote address by Rachel Fulcher-Dawson of Notre Dame & Corinne Weaver of Catholic Charities in Fort Worth, Texas. They shared the results of a partnership entitled "Stay the Course" in Fort Worth at Tarrant County Community College. The program is a planned intervention for low-income students. In structuring the study four main reasons for student drop-out were:

In EED 280 - Standards, Observation, and Assessment of Typical/Atypical Behaviors of Young Children Birth to Age Eight, in Module 5 of the course, students create and present a 5-8 slide PowerPoint presentation based on their analysis of the Module's readings which include articles and other texts.