After a student plagiarized a“how to paraphrase” assignment, I was dismayed with student correspondence that I received due its tone and the student’s continued misunderstanding of why it was plagiarism. Because students often avoid paraphrasing, and instead choose to repeatedly use direct quotations, I created a student-instructor role play assignment for ENG 102. See attached assignment for details.
Science faculty are constantly hearing from their students, "This isn't math! I didn't learn this in my math class". Many students are not able to transfer what they learned in math into their science courses. Most of the concepts in MAT091 are crucial to success in science. Throughout the semester, I met with 6 science faculty to discuss HOW students see these topics in science classes.
The general public has numerous misconceptions about science. My PHY101 students explored this intersection of science with society by researching a topic, performing a survey, and creating an educational website. The students chose a topic from a list to research. After researching the student came up with a question to test the misconception and three follow up questions to challenge it. The students presented their results in a non-traditional format, an informative website. This educational website was evaluated based on the attached assessment sheet.
Each semester all ECN instructor at EMCC administer the ECN common final exam, a multiple choice test based on our courses learning outcomes, in addition to a course-specific final. Instructors collect the frequency distribution of student responses, and results are aggregated to look for discipline-wide strenghts and weaknesses. We then create Learning Outcomes Improvement Plans (LOIPs) to identify ways to changes in pedagogy/curriculum to address weaker areas.
As a way of studying design principles related to composition I have my students complete an exercise that evaluates the compositional strategy employed in a great work of painting from art history. The students create two diagrams that chart the way the artist uses design principles like scale, line, color, rhythm, unity, emphasis and balance to control the way the eye moves, additionally they map they way the artist uses value (light and dark) to create emphasis and illusions of depth.
Based on research in student success, the Adjunct Faculty (AF) Professional Learning Community (PLC) recommended a program in 2010 “to engage/retain the college’s best adjunct faculty, explore and deepen Learning College best practices within the classroom”. Portions of their recommendations were implemented through AF training workshops.
I had being noticing for years that a majority of students in every semester does not score in there exams as expected and hence I planned to keep aside the last 3 days at the end of the last semester as follows.
Dec/02/2013 - Exam Review, Dec/04/2013 - MOCK EXAM*, Dec/06/2013 - Review again with regard to the Mock Exam Results and compared it with The Final Exam on Dec/11/2013 and Dec/09/2013 respectively.
the following were the results.
In my ESL Informal Conversation class, students were introduced to 12 new slang phrases regarding "taking a vacation." I tested students on their ability to use those words by providing a "fill-in the blank activity." I was not happy with the results.
Objective: To help students understand the process of determining filing status' for tax payer clients in various given scenarios. Students struggled to determine filing status and the number of exemptions clients may claim.
Dance can be very deceptive; how a movement feels or looks in a mirror rarely provides a clear indication of what is happening in the body. To help students acquire an accurate perception and develop a self-directed process for improving their dance training, I combine a Goals and Assessment Sheet with videotaping at the Midterm and Final. In the Fall of 2013, when it was clear that students didn’t understand how to choose a movement assessment, I added descriptive language and included examples on the Goals and Assessment Sheet for Spring of 2014.
In the last 5 years the chemistry program has made a switch to a fully active learning pedagogy. While we are finding this to be a huge success for the students, it is causing some problems for our instructors. Since this is a novel approach for teaching chemistry classes, most content qualified instructors are not familiar with how to present curriculum in this way.
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.
Since August 2009, I have had students come and see me (as division chair) to ask about retaking the placement exam to get into a higher course. During these last 5 years, I have always had the students go to the math videos created by math faculty on the EMCC placement website. I also told these students to go to www.khanacademy.org and use this free online resource to assist them. In every case, students placed higher on the placement exam (unfortunately, I did not keep a tally for the number of students this impacted).
To assess students understanding of major theories and content elements I have students present concepts with teammates, or Iearning teams . Students work with a team of 3 to 4 students and present once a week on a topic covered in the chapter we are discussing for that week.
I find that it keeps students connected, helps them manage nervousness they may experience when speaking in front of large groups. They have to check audience understanding by creating a way to involve all classmates.