Critical Thinking

Assessment Practitioner was offered through the CTL this Spring 2020 semester for interested faculty and staff that wanted to continue their professional growth.  This hybrid Canvas course is designed to equip our faculty and staff with the information to understand the goals and practices of assessment in our Learning College culture.  This course has given the opportunity to model the true essense of a Learning College, by faciliating the natural relationship between teaching, learning, and assessment through weekly face-to-face sessions, weekly assignments, and colleague discus

Update: In Fall 2020 and Spring 2021, I continued to use the scaffolding handout that addressed conceptual understanding of limits at infinity (as described in this CATS). This handout addresses EMCC's ILO of critical thinking along with the CLO of choosing the most appropriate tool/technique to solve a problem. In both Fall and Spring semesters, I had similar results with roughly 75% of students (both semesters) answering the limits at infinity question correctly on the final.

Angela McClure and I worked on this as part of our calc I/phy I learning community.  She and I plan to re-evaluate this in the Spring and I will also try this in the other learning community.  I will be reaching out to some of my calculus colleagues to see if they are interested in trying this with some of our exams that are more "skill" based an not conceptual.  Angela mentioned possibly looking into doing something like this with vectors in PHY121.  Is this worth the time and effort with doing this?  Are students willing to take advantage of this opportunity?

See attached. 

One of the student learning outcomes of this class is to discuss current industry events. It is difficult to assess discussing events and generally the whole class doesn't participate in discussions equally. By creating a writing assignment to discuss and analyze events I gained a strong means to measure an SLO and both writing and critical thinking. The assignment was a good way to start off the class and to get student engagement for the day.

I am hoping that having this extra practice and group work in the long run strengthens not only their ability to do derivatives but also their algebra skills. Unfortuantely I do not have enough time in one semester to do this in every topic we cover, so I am hoping to come up with more creative ways to have them do this practice outside of class, that does not make them complain to me that I am giving them too much homework. 

The effectiveness of concept mapping (CM) has been investigated in introductory chemistry students' achievement.  The researcher tested the hypothesis which stated that the implementation of concept mapping in teaching introductory chemistry will increase students’' performance.  The sample was two sections, experimental group and control group.  Both groups had taken a pretest.  The experimental group draw CM’s for the units taught.  The units included naming, moles, balancing equation, stoichiometry, and molarity.  At the end of the semester, the performance

We increased the acceptance rate at the Student Conference 2018 while increasing rigor by providing scaffolding and a revise/resubmit process with support structures.  Acceptance rates rose significantly from 28.7% in 2017 to 70% in 2018 with added rigor as expressed by MCCCD faculty who had attended previous conferences.  Additionally, for the first time, 9 out of 10 MCCCD colleges participated in the conferences.

Introductory Biology for Allied Health, Bio 156, is a course many students take for the nursing major.  This course teaches a number of concepts that are important and repeated throughout other biology prerequisite courses (Bio 201 Anatomy and Physiology I, Bio 202 Anatomy and Physiology II, and Bio 205 Microbiology), nursing block 1-4 courses, and the NCLEX, nursing certification exam.  The purpose of this CATS is to question whether the concepts we teach are retained through the courses. We decided to pick one topic and study this process.

Having now completed 3 semesters teaching BIO 182 - General Biology II for Science Majors, the area consistiently identified by student surveys as in need of improvement is the "Quality of the Textbook."  The book is expensive (>$100), and yet, I have observed that many/ most students do not read the supplemental chapters that align with lectures / activities / labs unless I assign end-of-chapter comprehension questions.  Following being awarded a FRACTYL grant last spring, I have been developing an OER, consisting of a series of engaging, supplemental videos that focus on case

Chemistry students are required to think about the atomic nature of matter, while only being able to see the macroscopic level.  To help them, we use particle (atomic) level diagrams that rely on different colors, shapes and lines to represent different types of particles, phases, reactions, and temperatures.  These models are used throughout their chemistry courses particularly when systems become too complex to describe concisely in text or formulas.  A firm grasp of understanding and drawing these diagrams is important for success in the future.  However we never dire

In fall 2010, I wrote a workbook to replace the $250 textbook.  Please note:  I do not receive royalties from this workbook.  The workbook (wb) was used in the calculus/physics learning community as well as traditional calculus classes by me only.  Over the years, I have made modification to the wb.