For many years now, physics/chemistry faculty require students to journal after each class period (note: there are other faculty on campus who have been journaling for years, as well). In Fall 2017, a few non-phy/chem faculty incorporated journaling in their classrooms for the first time. In Spring 2018, during week of accountability, approximately 15 instructors met and discussed best practices in journaling.
I incorporated "One Minute Paper" classroom assessment technique by K. Patricia Cross (1993) into ENG091 classroom learning during the entire semester of Fall 2017. By far, this class had the most diverse student population that was comprised of: Junior ACE (high school dual students), traditional first year underprepared students, Adult Re-entry students, and students with disability.
One of the biggest challenges for nursing students is to acclimate to the world of the nursing school exam. Gone are the days of one right answer, the nursing student must learn how to prioritize several correct answers to determine which is the "most" correct. During the Spring 2017, utilization of the Adaptive Quizzing/Learning Resources was highly encouraged but not attached to course points. In Fall of 2017, the Adaptive Learning activities were attached to 39 of the 600 total course points, leading to a 206% increase in student utilization.
A learning objective for Com 230HC is for students “identify, read, synthesize, and discuss information from a current scholarly, peer reviewed journal article.” Three topics being in Communication, and one topic of choice, in their area of interest.
EMCC's Honors Department designed the first Exposition Fair to allow all students to showcase their work in different formats including roundtables for students to discuss their work in progress, poster displays, oral presentations and interactive displays. David Weaver was our keynote speaker and responses from participant surveys evaluating the Exposition Fair were overwhelmingly positive! Almost two-thirds of survey participants (N=90) reported that they did not know about the Makerspace and strongly agreed that they liked the interactive nature of the fair as well as the var
Statistics elicit overall student angst, which affects grades, attitude, attrition and learning. Although students attended tutoring, were allowed to re-do homework and engaged in interactive classroom experiences, PSY 230 course retention rate remained at 25%. I used a different pedagogical technique this semester - Mastery Learning - which was used successfully in K-12 grades. Rather than a traditional letter grade or percentage on assignments, students received "not yet" grades and instructor feedback. Resubmissions were accepted as many times as necessary to reach mastery.
There were some incidents on campus last semester where students were not comfortable taking care of their personal space. We have found that students do not feel empowered to make decisions and share their thoughts. In order to be successful in life, students need the tools to be able to express themselves confidently, even if they are uncomfortable due to pressure and concerns of rejection. At times, social categories impact how much personal power we have and how we use it. This includes, gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, religion, etc.
After completing midterm evaluations, students expressed a desire to have less lecture and more activities. Therefore, I designed and implemented a CATS to assess different approaches to learning in my COM 100 courses (5 sections) over a two-week experimental period. I compared a traditional lecture based approach (control group – 1 section), balanced lecture and interactive learning approach (experimental group 2 sections), and completely interactive learning approach with no lecture (experimental group 2 sections).
A prerequisite to physics is MAT182. Students need to know law of sine/cosine, and vector concepts from trig to be successful in physics. In the past, I would spend a lot of time classify triangles (SSS, ASA, etc) to help students know which "law" to use, and this was done at the end of the semester. I did not spend time using law of sine/cosine with vector applications . Students typically scored a low B on law of sine/cosine problems. In F17, I taught the "laws" and incorporated vectors in week 4 to show students real life applications.
Sociology courses have topics that are taboo, disturbing, offensive and controversial. SOC 212 (Gender and Society) students read "If Men Could Menstruate" by Gloria Steinem. Students tend to get defensive and miss the important point on power in society. On average 50% of the students would be defensive in the discussion responses and miss the importance of the article. I decided to rewrite the directions for the assignment so that students would focus on critically thinking as sociologists.
While working in classroom, I found that students gravitated towards friends to create their team or learning community. This behavior created "clicky" groups in the classroom and I noticed silos of learning taking place. What I decided to implement in my classroom was randomizing the groups with Popsicle sticks. Each time we had a learning activity I used these sticks (that had a student name per stick) to randomly place the students into groups.
We specifically investigated how we can integrate creativity more effectively in the classroom for the benefit of both students and faculty. Our investigation included: reading Creative Confidence, learning more about Design Thinking challenges, locating and sharing creativity resources, using creativity to personally address one teaching challenge, and implementing at least one actitivty/lesson/strategy that we deveop using creativity to at least one class this semester.
Students kept an Excavation Journal through the five weeks of ENH251: Mythology. They were advised to use their journal to record: observations, notes, questions, ideas, images, sketches, maps and artifacts in addition to the answers to the various Dig Sheets. Each Dig Sheet focuses on a particular area of world mythology, engaging the student in reflective thinking about assigned readings while also encouraging their use of creativity.
In my Ethics course I assigned students a criminal justice current events assignment. This was a written report in which students were given the choice of choosing an incident of unethical conduct. I found that about half of the students did not have a clear comprehension of what was involved and why it was a problem. Many students were not able to answer basic questions. Three semesters ago I changed the assignment to include an oral presentation in class.
I had nine students who were disengaged in group discussions. They had not actively participated in our class discussions by: being active, speaking up, volunteering for activities, or asking or answering questions.
To help, I used nine small candy bars, and taped them to the bottom of these student's desk. Students discussed nine key points in small groups. This way every student was actively involved in the learning of the material. After, students had to reach under their desk, and if they had a chocolate bar they were the chosen ones to share.
I discovered: