Critical Thinking

This assessment assesses the CLO of "Students will pick the most appropriate tool/technique to solving a problem" as well as the ILO of written communication. 

In October 2020, SAC Co-Coordinators facilitated two virtual luncheons. EMCC Faculty and staff had to opportunity to review  ILO and CLO data.  The goal was to facilitate meaningful conversations about student learning.

Anatomy & Physiology is the foundational subject ; students learn about human body systems' structure and function. Structure and function complement each other if the structure changes it will affect the function and vise versa. The deeper understanding of the subject will help students understand the change and make connections among body systems; this is central to understand and treat the diseases. Case studies assignments help students link content knowledge to clinical application.

CATS purpose:  See if a statistically significant difference existed on final exam scores (common assessment) between a 16-week online course & an 8-week online course, based on different class lengths of GBS151-Introduction to Business.  Given the upcoming HLC visit and emphasis upon institutional learning objectives (ILO's) and class learning objectives(CLO's), I wanted to assess student learning in this top 40 class, where students use critical thinking skills to successfully pass the final exam.    

In Fall 20, math courses transitioned to a Live Online format versus traditional online. Faculty spent the summer frantically learning technologies and strategies through workshops, brainstorming sessions, and social media. Math faculty also trained one another on Zoom/Webex, NearPod, and Whiteboard.fi with a common goal -  to learn and implement new tools in the virtual environment to keep students engaged; increasing student success and persistence.

Update (1 week after CATS was originally submitted): After submitting this CATS, students began learning about Power Series (which is one reason to learn Convergence/Divergence of series discussed in this CATS).  WIth the scaffolding handout, they were able to come up with how to deteremine convergence/divergence of Power Series on their own!  Again, I typically have to do a lot more lecture, but I didn't.

The Life Sciences Division created a divsion level assessment. Though some biology courses were not able to complete the assessment due to the COVID19 response, results show an increase in score from lower level biology courses to higher level courses. 

Peer Lead Focus and Learning Review

Monitoring student engagement and learning during class & providing feedback is tough due to lack of time. One way to do this is Peer lead learning review; it monitors engagement and provides feedback.

The class was divided into six groups of four students; one student acted as a peer leader. The peer leaders were rotated after 3 weeks, allowing each group member to act as a peer leader.

N/A

The integration of Kahoot in CHM130 instruction will be investigated.  In this work, Kahoot will be developed to serve students in CHM130 in compound naming topic.  Students performance will be compared in naming compounds in this semester with students' performance in the last two years.  The study hypothesis stated that students in CHM130 who practice naming compound in Kahoot will score better than students who didn't practice naming of compounds in Kahoot.

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?