Developmental Education Strategies

In conjunction with the 4DX campus initiative and the EMCC Super Goal #1, the math division developed the following WIG:  To contribute to closing the equity gap and improving a student’s sense of belonging, the Mathematics Division will increase the student’s response average on the twenty questions of the Classroom Community Survey (Rovai, 2002) from a 2.2 to 2.5 by December 2021.  Residential faculty reported what types of activities/practices were implemented in their classes to increase a student's sense of belonging.  Students reported an average score of 2.7898

This syllabus research project is an example of assessing learning practices to enhance learning environments at the classroom, program, and college level. I learned from student success literature that often, underrepresented students will not ask for exceptions to syllabus policies while their counterparts will, thus creating unintentional equity gaps with class syllabus policies. I studied various course syllabi from EMCC classes to see how my policies compare. I then surveyed EMCC faculty and students about the course syllabus.

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.

The integration of Kahoot in CHM130 instruction will be investigated.  In this work, Kahoot will be developed to serve students in CHM130 in compound naming topic.  Students performance will be compared in naming compounds in this semester with students' performance in the last two years.  The study hypothesis stated that students in CHM130 who practice naming compound in Kahoot will score better than students who didn't practice naming of compounds in Kahoot.

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.

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.

Time from subject matter in class to attend the 2019 Spring Student Success Fair was worthwhile.