Developmental Education Strategies

In my RDG courses my students complete weekly Reading Response Journals (RRJ). Students are required to read anything they would like and fill out a template with required information about what they read. They are required to format the information in a specific way. I observed that students consistently struggled with the correctly formatting the document and making sure they included all the correct information, and were losing many points as a result. I had provided detailed instructions on how to format the document/information but students were still struggling.

Note: This CATS is being submitted by Rebecca Baranowski, Michelle Breaux, Teri Graham, Sarah Lockhart and Luvia Rivera. In summer 2015, these math faculty attended the Johnson & Johnson Cooperative Learning Institute at SMCC. One of the suggested activities for increasing cooperative learning is to put folders on the tables at the beginning of class. Inside of the folders is a warm up for students to work on together. The institute suggested having only 1-2 sheets of paper in the folder to "force" students to talk to each other about the documents in the folder.

Every semester my students start class (both face to face and online) with the Getting Started Module.  One of the assignments is the "Meet Your Class" assignment.  This assignment is standard in Canvas and requires that students embed a picture into their discussion post.  Embedding a picture in Canvas is not the simple cut and paste or upload that the students are used to.  When I first started using this assignment (Spring  2013) the average score on this assignment was 16.44/20 due to an unsuccefully embedded photo.

I piloted EDU221 Online for fall 2012. All EDU courses mandate a Field Experience (FE) where students spend the required number of hours (for this class it is 30) in a K-12 classroom. This is a tedious process with multiple steps, including the acquisition of a Fingerprint Clearance Card, which is an additional cost. As a result, it is not uncommon for a student to drop a class, receive an incomplete (until they finish their FE the subsequent semester), or, worse yet, fail the class due to incompletion of the FE.

In my 16 week RDG 091 course, prior to the first group presentation, I spend one or two classes teaching students the oral and format expectations of an oral PowerPoint presentation.  In Fall, 2013, I taught an 8 week version of the RDG 091 course and found that there was limited time to extensively teach these skills prior to their first oral presentation.  I provided them the rubric ahead of time and covered the information as best I could with the time I had.  However, I was very disappointed in the results.