Classroom/Individual

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

EMCC has determined that communication is important and thus, included this skill on the EMCC General Education Abilities Matrix.  CIS105 has a module in which PowerPoint is taught, primarily focusing on the technological side of creating a presentation and how to incoporate the different technological aspects of the program.  Time was spent discussing not only the technology of presentations, but the delivery side as well incorporating the EMCC matric indicators.  Based upon the results of the mid-term presentation data, instruction/feedback will continue on the importance o

Great ideas can happen anytime, anywhere. To make it easy to keep track of ideas for course/ lesson planning improvement, I developed a “Course Edits Tracker” worksheet in Google Docs for each ot the courses I teach. This document can be accessed anywhere, anytime, online. The form includes a field to track why the change is needed or how the idea will improve the course/ activity/ lesson along with a field to enter student performance/ measure/ outcomes of the proposed edits/ enhancements.

Time from subject matter in class to attend the 2019 Spring Student Success Fair was worthwhile.

 

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

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