Behavioral Sciences & Cultural Studies

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.

I have been using the "ticket in" approach to check comprehension & preparedness (as well as take attendance) for several years. Students know they will be held accountable for completing the at-home readings with their ticket in. Additionally, students can ask question that they had about the readings for me to address in class on their ticket-in. It has proven to be a low stakes, high efficiency assessment of readiness to learn, as well as clarifying information they encounter between class sessions.

Honors students in my Communication courses are required to propose and complete a Service Learning project. Documentation of Cognitive & Affective learning achievement and Critical Thinking skills are to be formally evidenced in a presentation. To promote deeper learning and thinking throughout the semester as the students engage in their projects, I expounded the Project Proposal to include their expected learning outcomes and thinking processes.  Throughout the semester students referred to their proposa

During finals week class time, SOC 212 (Gender and Society) students create a public service announcement. The instructions given are "Based on the information you learned on gender and society, what would you focus on to promote social change? You are going to create a two minute Public Service Announcement to share with the class." The goal of this assessment is to see which topic is chosen as most important to create a public service announcement. Students were required to choose one topic; some chose more than one to discuss.

In another assessment, the gender issues survey incorporated in SOC 212 as a pre and post survey is discussed. The focus is on similarities and differences between the pre and post results. This assessment focuses on the post survey as a comparison between hybrid and online. A spreadsheet is attached with the results for Spring 2013. The similarities between the hybrid and online courses include 1. majority of students indicate that most of the listed gender issues are important and very important (higher end of scale) 2.

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.

In order to get students more personally involved in the learning process, students are given the responsibility of choosing four debate topics that are then used to formulate the questions used in the formal debates in the course.

Through a combination of guided discussion and voting students decide as a group what they will research and debate.

In order to help students explore their prior knowledge and initiate creative and critical thinking about a new topic, students are shown a work of art at the begining of a new unit. The subject matter of the work of art is related to the general topic of the new unit. Students then write on 3 prompts reflecting on the work of art:

1) What do I see?

2) What do I think?

3) I wonder ...

I explain in more detail how these prompts are used to initiate critical thinking in the attached document.

Last week, I took the last 5 minutes of class and asked students to write which concepts were the mot confusing ("muddiest") for them of the current and previous chapter.  I categorized the results with the help of Excel (attached) to find out the most troublesome concepts.  I discovered that there were five areas that had multiple student mention, including the calculation of inflation (CPI) and unemployment calculation.  I restructured my lesson plan for the next today's class to first focus on those 5 specific areas as review.

EMCC's ECN faculty have developed and implemented the common ECN212 (Microeconomic Principles) final exam by first defining our discipline-wide Learning Objectives (LO) and then created multiple choice questions for the common final portion across all sections.  Instructors recorded each students' response for each question in an excel spreadsheet and sent to me, who aggregated and analyzed the results.  Overall results were good with 2 more LOs scoring above 80% and 2 fewer scoring below 60%.

In Fall 2012 I had an incredible group of engaged, collaborative, and dedicated students in Abnormal Psychology (PSY 266) Hybrid.  So I was shocked and dismayed when I saw that many of my most knowledgable and active students had failed the class when BB calculated their total grades.  Digging deeper, I found that 100% of the failing grades resulted from a single source; the failure to do sufficient online work.

The Humannequin Project includes an assessment each year which varies by topic. The 2013 assessment, rubric, and student scoresheet are attached. Each questions always focuses on Bloom's Taxonomy: Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze,  Evaluate and Create.  Questions 4 and 6 have lower averages. These two areas need to be improved for the 2014 project. UPDATE: For 2014, the topic for the project was gender and language.

EMCC's ECN faculty have developed and implemented the common ECN211 (Macroeconomic Principles) final exam by first defining our discipline-wide Learning Objectives (LO) and then created multiple choice questions for the common final portion across all sections.  Instructors recorded each students' response for each question in an excel spreadsheet and sent to me, who aggregated and analyzed the results (See attached).  Overall results showed slight improvements in 4 LOs but 2 were worse than the previous semester.

Since Spring 2010, a common assignment has been incorporated into Sociology 101 (Introduction to Sociology). A group of faculty worked on the assignment and rubric with the SAAC co-chairs during Fall 2009. The assignment has been implemented at the end of each semester in the SOC 101 courses (learning outcomes, assignment, and rubric attached below). I have attached some of the comments and results from the instructors from each of the semesters (when information was provided).

The Social, Civic, Global Responsibility Common Assignment was implemented in SOC 130 (Human Sexuality). Students were given the topic of the AIDS epidemic as their focus for this assignment. The rubric was given at the same time as the assignment. Both were discussed and reviewed in class. The focus of the assignment tied in with the rest of the semester as the students organized the EMCC AIDS team, raised money for AIDS awareness, and created slides to be shown outside during the AIDS Day event. The average scores were as follows:



Question 1:  2.67(of 3)