Face to Face

The "Let’s Get Ready Together" Open House at EMCC was a welcoming and informative event designed to prepare students and their support networks for the upcoming semester. With over 344 students and their support systems in attendance, the event featured faculty, staff, and representatives from multiple departments, offering guidance on academic, financial, and personal resources available on campus. Through lab tours, campus tours, and one-on-one interactions, attendees gained familiarity with campus facilities, course expectations, and support services.

This CATs explores the use of a game-based learning activity, modeled after Taboo©, to boost student engagement, communication skills, and conceptual understanding across disciplines. Students worked in pairs to describe and guess course-specific terms without using certain "taboo" words, reinforcing complex concepts while improving verbal and listening abilities. Mixed-methods assessments revealed increased engagement, deeper understanding, and enhanced skills critical for STEM, healthcare, humanities, and social sciences.

CAPS PLO assessment to measure CAPS student learning at the program level.  

The ET (embedded tutoring) program was not sustained after the 22-23 academic school year.  Student surveys from Spring 22 report 62% of respondents say having an embedded tutor helped them feel comfortable asking for help; 60% of respondents report having an embedded tutor deepened their understanding of course topics and concepts; 49% of respondents report the embedded tutor improved their critical thinking skills.

The entire Life Sciences FT faculty and the LS Administrative Specialist Sr, Lynn Abrams Comtois contributed to this CATS.   (Not all names were available to be selected and added in the section below). 

When finding derivatives using the chain rule, a common student error is to "forget the chain".  By visually confirming the derivative equation they calculated matches the derivative graph generated by Desmos, students can confirm correct rule choice and correct application of rules.  If the graphs don't match, students can then make small changes to their equation until the derivatives match.

I created a series of discussion assignments for my BIO201 courses titled Anatomy of a Superhero for the purpose of prompting students to think about human anatomy and physiology from a different perspective and to help reinforce the principles of normal human anatomy and physiology.

To improve student learning reflections through CATS and Program Review (Assessment Plan).

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

In AY19/20 Jeff Miller created a Life Sciences Assessment tool that uses 24 questions to measure understanding of general biology concepts along with critical thinking, reading comprehension and data analysis skills in a biological context.  The tool was used in multiple BIO course sections primarily taught by FT faculty and a CATS by Shannon Manuelito (Aug.

The ECN faculty were interested in assessing our students' writing skills as we assign reserach papers to them each semester using the standard writing rubric.  Students' essays were collected at the end of the fall 2020 semester for analysis in spring 2021. This began with an inter-rater reliability study to normalize our responses, followed by assessing for baseline data.

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.

Using discussion protocols in a live online learning format promotes independent student collaboration and engagement in group discussions through quality instruction and student support. In conjunction with the use of Google documents and live online breakout rooms (Zoom, Webex, or Google Meets), protocols drive independent student discussion and collaboration using a set of guidelines that include student roles and responsibilities. Discussion protocols also allow for fostering student-to-student relationships and for providing immediate real-time feedback by faculty.