Classroom/Individual

Knowledge retention and transfer are at the core of what we do. It is evident that all students learn in different ways. However, if students are asked to DO something in the process of learning they will not only retain the information but rather be able to comprehend how it is applied to the real world. In addition, as the students start to report out to the class the instructor can listen to the responses and clarify or demonstrate the material to ensure long term retention success. For more information not included in this write up, please attachments.

The purpose of this CATS is to explore student withdrawal rates and exam scores from six MAT151 courses across two semesters to determine whether Video Lessons or Journal Entries appear to lead to greater student course retention and improved learning.  

See comments for update to close the loop.  

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.

Students struggle with mastering concepts in microbiology. Journaling is a method that is documented to help students learn science courses. We implemented journaling recently and wanted to see if there is any significant impact after 3 semesters of collecting data.

Spoiler alert - nope, at least with the way we are implementing journaling currently. We are regrouping and will restructure the directions to hopefully guide students to be more successful in their journaling. 

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?

The FA office provides workshops for employees as well as students because Financial Aid and Scholarship processes are complex. This is especially true with Title IV FA federal regulations. EMCC FA staff are responsible for these regulations/processes and assisting students. Non-FA employees who work with students often request general financial aid and scholarship workshops so they can better service students in relation to how their roles affect the student's FA. As money is critical to EMCC students they may make decisions about their education based on the financial aid impact.

In Spring 2018, administrators came back from HLC informing us that we needed to have learning outcomes written and assessed.  We had a college wide push over the past year to get these written at the course, program, and co-curricular level.  We are struggling with people understanding how everything should be aligned, so the assessment coordinators, champions, and committee members are working to help alleviate confusion.  

See attached. 

Helping students find success is the goal of teaching. By adding a short preview assignment allowing students to focus on upcoming larger essay assignments in Canvas, they learn the importance of taking the time to review assignment instructions before starting in, they think about what they're being asked to do, what challenges they might face while working on the asisgnment, what resources they can access for help, and ask specific questions of their instructor. Instructors can immediately respond and clarify or realign student preceptions setting students up for success.

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 purpose of this CATS is to really dive into one concept and try to figure out what students don't understand about basic integration.  Why is everything u-sub?  After each WU, I will use the information to write another WU to go further into the issues students are having.  The goal is to come up with a set of questions/problems that students have to do which "attack" a concept from multiple directions.  If I can cover the concept in many different ways and variations, I hope to fill any and most gaps students may have in their understanding of basic integration.

Please note:  From speaking with faculty in the prerequisite coureses, they are incorporating reviews of rules of exponents and fractions.  But, at what detail and how, I am unsure.  Hopefully with the creation of SLOs and having Guided Pathways, we can come up with some activities and best practices as a group to help students understand these two concepts better.  I am not happy with the idea of just accepting that students will not be able to integrate a fractional problem that requires rules of exponents.  There has to be something out there to help our students