A key to fully appreciate art is understanding the creative journey and the underlying creative critical thinking which leads to the “message and meaning” of the piece.
Honors students are given the option of completing an individual or small group creative project to fulfill their honors enrichment plan.
Drawing inspiration from French philospher Marcel Proust, who wrote of the connection between involuntary memories & physical stimuli (e.g. smell), students were given 10 study cards which were color, flavor, & scent-coordinated to facilitate memorization of English principle verb parts (simple, simple past, & past participle forms) in an ESL030 Grammar III course.
Every anthropology class starts with an explanation of anthropology and the fact that there are four main sub-fields in anthropology (i.e. Archaeology, Cultural, Linguistics, Physical.) Each anthropologist specializes in one of these fields. At the beginning of the semester each field is discussed, explained, and students are encouraged to think of examples of each. After understanding the fields, they are asked which of the fields they think they would like best.
In Fall 2014 I re-designed my COM225 Public Speaking course into a 5-week "Fast Track to Completion" format. When I recalled having taught Summer sessions (which are also 5 weeks in duration), I remembered that students had difficulty completing the reading assignments from the established textbook--it was quite lengthy (and expensive). But, I wanted to see if taking the course during the regular semester might make a difference in student engagement with the textbook. Dismal results. Only about 75% of the students were reading and comple
My BIO 160 students often have difficulty identifying and locating peer reviewed resources for a disease research paper. I have worked with the EMCC librarians to show students databases, citation tools, and a discussion of peer revied versus popular articles. At this time the students used the library website and found two potential resources. To improve this process, Jennifer Wong has created a screencast that shows how to use the library website to locate resources.
The goal of these assessments was to engage students in hands on experiments similiar to a science lab. Students always ask why differential equations is so important in STEM fields. So, two labs were done in my differential equations class. One was using thermometers and checking their accuracy (how long does it take for the thermometer to get back to body temperature after drinking cold water, doing jumping jacks, and chewing gum (placebo)). The 2nd one was to verify that a mass spring system follows a 2nd order differential equation.
Students in MAT 182 seem to constantly struggle with the graphing section in the course. I have added days in for practice, given worksheets and still results seem to be lower than I was expecting. This current semester I continued with the practice worksheet that has 10 graphing problems where they are to use a table to help them graph, identify amplitude, phase shift and period, as well as of course graph the function. However, this semester I tried giving them two separate packets where all I did was change the numbers around and change a few numbers in the function.
I utilize several techniques to assist my students with their anxiety and "fear" of math.
The accounting faculty has adopted a new text book for the accounting sequence ACC111-ACC230-ACC240. All content is contained in one text, thus reducing the overall cost to the student. A good deal of the basic content in ACC111 will be repeated in a condensed version in ACC230. In order to determine the retention from ACC111 to ACC230 I am developing a pretest on Canvas to see what basic accounting knowledge will need to be highlighted during the first few lesson modules.
Biology concepts like tonicity are difficult to grasp, especially for students in BIO100.Most students “get it” when a concept is applied to their lives. But the question is, will more practical applications translate to a better understanding of the concept?
I traditionally assess whether students are reading using a 10-question multiple choice quiz per chapter. Students asked if they could use their notes and/or books. I allowed students in my MWF PSY230 course to use their notes/books for the quizzes while those in the T TH section were not allowed to do so. I kept track of how long it took students to complete the quizzes and their average quiz scores over a ten week period.
Students in MAT156/157 preparing to be elementary school teachers sometimes struggle to think of ways to make learning math creative and fun.
The classroom communication is not alway transfer to my students correctly or to their understanding. I would like to be more clear and concise in my communication. I like to get my idea across with the first communication if possible.
This fall I compared (Like Becky Baranowski had done for Calc 2) students coming from the PHY 121 traditional class versus those in PHY121/MAT221 Learning community on the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism. While the numbers are small (n=12 from LC and n=10 from traditional) it was interesting to compare. Both groups had essentially the same pretest score (LC 18.2% and Trad 18.3%) but differed on the post test (LC 67% and trad 52%). Since the numbers are small I will be adding the students from this spring semester to try and get more statistically reliable numbers
Since Spring 2013, I have required students to submit their drafts to the Online writng center for feedback. Over the past several semesters, I have seen their average scores go from 43 out of 60 on increase to 52 out of 60 on the short essay and from 62 out of 80 on the long essay to 70 out of 80 on the long essay. I have made some revisions using submission links to canvas and hope to close the loop at the end of the semester for RDG 095, RDG 091, CRE 101 and RDG 081.