Student Engagement

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.

I observe many students frantically cramming before quizzes, stressing themselves out and potentially reducing their academic peformance due to test anxiety. Research shows test anxiety could diminish academic performance.  To test if anxiety reducing activities lead to better test performance, I randomly led a anxiety reduction activity with two of my sections (stretching exercises, spontaneous laughter) and did not with three of the others, and compared results (see spreadsheet).

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.

In ENH202: World Literature after the Renaissance I utilized Literature Circles as a method for creating stronger community in online classes, deepening the engagement between students, and practicing group work in prep for the course final. Students were in 3 groups for 4 weeks at a time, each group given additional readings to read, analyze and report out using the Literature Circles roles. The student in the Connector role would collect the student’s work and post it in Canvas for grading and students would switch roles on their own each week.

Since rolling-out a new accounting textbook in Fall of 2015, covering three courses, ACC111, ACC230, & ACC240, the decision was made to move chapter 6, Inventory Valuation, from ACC111 to ACC230, effective Spring 2016.

The EDU students at EMCC strive to become future preK-12th grade teachers.  I strive to prepare my students for the reality of teaching by teaching the students to lesson plan, to provide effective instruction,  and in maintaining strong classroom management.   For the past 3 years, my students have learned the foundational skills in each area through in-class lesson plan writing and teaching their lessons to peers.  While this is valuable practice,  it is not the same as actually teaching children.   In or

Most chemistry labs are of the "cookbook" style, the labs are a series of steps to perform in the alloted time and not much thought goes into the performance.  The other option is to give students a problem to solve and then give them free reign to design a lab.  Many of the students have no idea where to begin the design phase of a lab and end up just looking up a cookbook lab and trying to make it work.  The other problem with the free reign option is safety and logistics with the laboratory prep.  Is it a safe lab?

The "I Am Human" Campaign focuses on choosing language that creates an inclusive culture demonstrating social awareness. Students watched the "I Am Human" video in addition to reading about the campaign on the EMCC website. Students participated in a pre/post survey and discussion board directly connected to the campaign. Their weekly video reflection and final journal entry are typical assignments in the Sociology courses. The students mentioned the campaign in both assignments as examples of what impacted them in the course. Please see the attached document on the results.

The humannequin project connects academic research with political art on specific gender issues. Students must research their gender issues and provide information from credible, academic sources.  SOC 212 students participated in the Information Literacy Assessment in 2011 and then again in 2014. The four areas in the assessment were (1) framing the research question, (2) accessing sources, (3) evaluation of information, and (4) create original work. The rubric created by the SAAC committee is attached as well as the spreadsheet with results (created by Terry Meyer and James Waugh).

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.

Sociology 130, Human Sexuality, focuses on the social, cultural, and institutional contributions to human sexuality. Throughout the semester, students address how society constructs expectations and limitations on sexuality. The last assignment is to create a sexual rights document and to discuss the document with your classmates. The sexual rights document will be assessed through a rubric which focuses on research, sociological imagination, and critical thinking. The SOC 130 online course will be piloted in Spring 2014.

The first project in my EDU classes each semester is a student investigation into a hot topic in the education field. Students must submit a Ppt and then present on the topic, using the Ppt as their audio-visual aide. Their grade is a combination of assessing their presentation and their hard-copy Ppts. To grade their hard copies, I use a Ppt Rubric (see attachmed). Historically the lowest score on the rubric has been "References" where they must accurately cite at least two credible references. The average score on this has been 2.0 out of 5 points.

A survey was completed (N=147) for the One Billion Rising Event. This is a sample of the percentages for responses of Agree and Strongly Agree.  Please see attachment. (1). One purpose of this event was to raise awareness of the global issue of violence against women. My understanding of the global issue of violence against women is greater after attending this event. 88% (2). Another purpose of this event was to encourage a better understanding of how individual action can bring about change in the larger culture and in personal lives.

Students continuously give us positive feedback on campus events. Love Your Body Week is assessed with a survey for the week long series of events. Self reflection questions focus on learning from the event, interest in going to other eventes, interest in learning about other social issues, interest in being active in the community, feeling open minded, and having resources on the social issues. If you examine the attachments, you will see results for the presentations, activitie,s and the outdoor event.

Nursing is challenged by requiring an extremely intense curriculum to be delivered to students in a very short amount of time. A solution the nursing department adopted in Fall 2012 to alleviate this problem is "Flipping" the classroom! "Flipping" is a new innovative teaching style that parallels with EMCC Learning College Guiding Principles. The students are given lectures and power point slides in the form of a video to be viewed before class and in-class time is devoted to exercises, case studies and discussions.