Mathematics

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).

I assign a Career Exploration Project (attached) for my engineering students to learn about engineering disciplines, careers, and professional societies. They do research, write a report, and present their findings to the class.  They capture the basics of the field and information about the professional societies, but I feel there is room for improvement, especially with professional societies and their benefits.

In past semesters students were awarded 5 extra credit points for 5 hours of tutoring on their exams.  However I started to question if students were going to tutoring just to get the extra credit points or if they really needed the help.  In Spring of 2013 I changed the tutoring requirements for all my courses.  Students would now be required to complete 10 hours of tutoring throughout the semester and this would count towards 5% of their grade.  I wanted students to attend tutoring because they saw a benefit and need, not just to get points.  Students were given a

I have tried multiple methods to improve student completion rates in MAT121.  One was to teach MAT121 integrated with AAA115.  While students learned about college success skills related to math, successful completion rates were not significantly higher with AAA115 than without. In one semester, the successful completion rate of my MAT121 with AAA115 was lower than my other MAT121 sections.

Madee Salehi, PhD 

In Spring 2013 I taught a 5-week MAT142 class as the second half of a linked MAT121-MAT142.  In order to alleviate some of the students’ math anxiety associated with exams and to demonstrate practical applications, I switched from exam-based assessments to project-based assessments with promising results. 

MAT 142 focuses on real-world application problems for non-science/engineering students.  These students typically do not like math and struggle in understanding the concepts.

I have just finished my first teaching class of MAT082 at EMCC. It was a nice experience for me. But there is one thing I felt like proposing to the structure of the course. I think there should be a midterm at the middle of the semester that covers half the syllabus (at least) and the exam format should be the same as finals. There are couple of positives in this :

1. Students will be introduced with the exam format

2. If the load of chapters are being reduced by half in the final then the students will have better chance to do good in it.

MAT082

This CATS is to discuss the difference between the final grade results on my traditional calculus I class vs. the one in a learning community with PHY121. 

Many people do learning communities (see MAT and CPD LC's) to try improve retention in classes.  However, the LC between PHY 121 and MAT 221 has been about trying to improve student understanding of the concepts of physics and calculus and how they fit together.  Retention and success in these coures have been fine which is reason for focus on understanding rather than retention.  From the attached file it can be seen that on the Force Concept Inventory the LC students did better than traditional class even though they had less math preparation for the course.

I ran MAT142 Online in F13, which is the first time our division has run an online course  Of the 31 who started the class, 20 will pass (with 1 depending on the final project score).  We had 5 written projects, and at the end of each project, I asked students to do a grade check which required them to give feedback on their progress and the course as a whole.  There were 3 common themes that I saw from the responses:

1)  Students felt projects did not reflect the learning they'd done in notes and homework.

For many years now, math instructors have made the claim that a students' prior knowledge in algebra impacts their success in calculus.  If a student struggles with their algebraic skills, can they still pass calculus?  To test this hypothesis, I ran data for 188 students which spans from Fall 2005 to Fall 2013 comparing students' 1st exam scores (review exam of algebra) to their final grade in the course.

In Fall 2013, I taught two calculus courses.  One of them is linked with Physics (a learning community) and another one is in the traditional format.  In the traditional format, calculus is a prerequisite for PHY121.  With the learning community, students are able to take both MAT220 and PHY121 in the same semester.  The learning community students have the advantage of seeing the applications of calculus in the same semester while the traditional students will see the applications a semester later.      

Since Fall 2003, a textbook was used in MAT220 (caculus I).  For the last 4 years, handouts were created to supplement the textbook.  This semester, students use only a workbook that I created.  The purpose of this assessment is to document my observations in the level of engagement of students from using textbook only, slowly incorporating worksheets, to full implementation of a workbook.   Most math textbooks are not designed to engage students, thus it was difficult to do so.