Classroom/Individual

In the 3rd week of PSY 101 students have to complete an assignment critical to college success (locating a research article in an academic journal on a specific topic and providing a summary, APA style reference, & informed opinion).  Recognizing that this task is usually just beyond the students' current abilities, I use extensive scaffolding to support their acquisition of these important skills. Nonetheless, grades on this assignment remain low and approximately 60 % of students are unable to successfully complete the full task.

BIO 201 is considered a ‘sieve’ class, in that it often weeds out the students who are not ready to advance to more difficult classes, and it is not uncommon for 40-50% of the class to fail, making the holes in the sieve rather large.

High school biology is the only prerequisite to enroll in BIO201 and it seems that students who have taken a BIO 156/181 prior to 201 have performed better.  To evaluate this observation, an informal survey was given to students to gather information about their previous biology experience.  

My students always seem to be intimidated by the word exam. I wanted to see what and why this happens. I gave the students a "practice problem" on graphing functions based on algebra and calculus ideas. They were not allowed to work on it together, however I did not call it an exam. I wanted to see how they did knowing it was not an exam. The students performance on the "practice" was outstanding. There were small errors in the algebra but the overall concept was near perfect. Out of two sections, a total of 53 students, everyone scored 90% or better.

After several years of teaching writing, it is clear that revision is the most important and most difficult part of the writing process.  I have stopped the traditional process of partnering student up, trading papers, and having them make random corrections.  Now, we correct papers as a class, we have substantive discussions about decisions in writing, and my students are actually learning how to be better writers.  I have used this in my ENG101 and ENG102 courses at EMCC, but this can easily be used in any course that incorporates writing.  I think this would be extrem

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.

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.

For the last 2 years, I have been using a question of the day to start my classes as part of a cooperative learning strategy learned from taking the Johnson & Johnson Cooperative Learning workshop.  After doing this for a a year, I wanted to get feedback from students, so I included items about the questions of the day (along with other cooperative activities) on my end of course evaluation.

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).

At the end of the semester, students in BIO160 take a cumulative lab practical.  A practical exam is set up in stations, the students physically move from station to station and has a “set up” from a lab.  There are 2-3 questions for each station; the exam is timed.  The first semester giving the practical, the scores were very low.  In an attempt to improve the scores, I gave the students a review and the grades improved slightly.  This has been the routine for a few semesters.  At the end Fall16, I tried a practice practical.  After an informal survey, I

CUL205 is a sophomore level course, which introduces students to French cuisine.  In the French culinary culture, “Le Repertoire de la Cuisine” is a world-renowned book used in advanced culinary courses.  The book is a reference book of ingredients and not a “how to make” the food item.  The goal of this CATS was to determine if the book was too advanced for students at a community college.   Students in CUL205 are to write menus as part of their lab assignments, and they had to reference the textbook a minimum of 6 times for each menu during the course.  A pre

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.

The EMCC Gen. Ed. abilities assessment cycle is a three years cycle. Prior to assessment there is never a guarantee that students have had formal instruction aligned to the abilities being assessed. Seeing an opportunity to test out an intervention tool in the form of an online tutorial, a pilot was conducted with two classes, ENG102 and ECN211. The tutorial was designed to align with the Information Literacy EMCC Gen. Ed. Abilities. The driving research question was: Can an intervention be created to support the teaching of EMCC Gen. Ed. IL Abilities for Information Literacy?

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.